This week our efforts continued in the spirit of forging industry, community, and school partnerships and understanding how we may be able to support one another's efforts. This included meetings with Dan Layman, CEO of Community Foundation of Central Blue Ridge, Larry Kroggel, Human Resources Director at Daikin Applied, and Chris Martin, Physics teacher and head coach of the Shenandoah Valley Governors School Robotics team. Our meeting with Dan Layman, hosted at VCTC, included discussing the vision for the program, curriculum, certification and our need for help with establishing additional contacts with potential community stakeholders. Dan highlighted the importance building a program that speaks to building a positive perception of manufacturing among our students and their families. He was pleased to hear that the program will have a strong industrial systems focus aligned with area manufacturer needs as well as a focus on industry certification and workforce development. We can't thank him enough for his willingness to support us through program development and launch. Next, our focus shifted back to industry. This time, we met with Daikin and Larry Kroggel, Director of HR. Daikin is a manufacturer of chillers for industrial HVAC applications. To give you an idea of what this means, their chillers are keeping the Georgia Dome cool during football season and the Emirates Towers in Dubai comfortable for guests where it's not unusual for temperatures to reach over 50F. Larry, like Dan, was very enthusiastic about our program and eager to understand how they can help. He was pleased to see that our proposed curriculum lines up very closely with the training program they provide for employees and that it includes a focus on Maintenance Awareness. This was great confirmation for us that our curriculum planning efforts are focused in the right direction. Larry also indicated that he was pleased with the fact that we were engaging Daikin at these early stages of program development so that we could have the opportunity to work together to inform that process jointly. To that end, he invited us to present to a broader audience at Daikin including their Director of Quality, Scott Krickenberger who is featured in the above video. Our visit to Daikin concluded with a fantastic "blue line" tour of the 500,000 sq.ft. facility. The blue line is the designated pedestrian walkway that snakes throughout the fab. The facility is essentially divided into two main functional areas, each managed by an area supervisor, that each comprise five or more distinct sub-areas related to size of the chillers that are being manufactured. It was so insightful to see how each sub-area is responsible for a unique step in the manufacturing process including sheet bending and rolling, insertion of copper tubing, assembly of various sections, testing and so on. During the tour Larry highlighted the fact that it's important for employees to be comfortable with, and responsible for, basic problem-solving and troubleshooting of their assigned areas. He stated that this requires the ability to read and interpret tool interface screens as well as real time data being collected and analyzed by factory systems. "This is not your daddy's manufacturing." Our week wrapped up with a great meeting with Chris Martin, Physics teacher and Head of the Robotics team at Shenandoah Valley Governors School (SVGS) and Engineering Technology teacher Vincent Daw. The nature of this meeting was a reach out to learn more about the robotics program given the role of robots in manufacturing, and to determine whether there is an opportunity for collaboration. We'll keep you posted about how things go. Stay tuned for more from us in future posts about the role that regional technical centers such as VCTC can play when it comes to interschool collaboration.
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why "Health of the line"The on-time completion, and finished quality, of a manufactured product is dependent upon how well things go at each and every step of the process. This is known as "health of the line". AuthorAndrei Dacko heads the development of the Manufacturing Technology program at VCTC. He brings over 20yrs combined experience across education, manufacturing, sales, and business development. Archives
January 2018
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