on Tuesday we finally had the introduction meeting „Open your Eyes“ to the course, which was pretty interesting although a lot information were redundant to those of the Course Brochure.
It was interesting to meet students from different field of studies. The “merging “ of engineers and artists is always quite interesting as on the one hand both need each other as they benefit from the skills in their daily life, but on the other hand their points of view, visions and opinions often are very different. For me as an engineer it is hard to understand that (in Germany) art students only go to university probably 5 times in the first year, but are painting, photographing and doing other creative things. I am sure artists can’t understand the engineer’s way of life either. But I am pretty sure, that both need to work together to create new trends and amazing products which make our life easier or more interesting. That is why I am really looking forward to the course and its objectives.
When Magnus mentioned that they (the course responsible) believe in merging and not in strict division into groups immediately an article a read recently came into my mind. I think that Magnus and the others don’t just believe in merging for the process of building the groups, but also while doing the project. The interesting in group work is that by the merging of the skills of all group members synergies appear which are way more productive than just the addition of the skills.
Now back to the article I read… When Henry Ford implemented the car production at the assembly line, the single work steps were reduced to a minimum and thereby the output and productivity increased intensely. But work got boring and soon first critics showed up. Under them was Charly Chaplin with his famous movie Modern Times, showing the stupidity of work in mass production.
I remember well, when I visited courses about industrial production during my bachelor studies in industrial engineering and business administration that internal production flexibility was hyped as the new way of successful production. The so called cell production should be introduced to use the synergies of group work. The work steps for assembly line workers should be enlarged up to 30 minutes to benefit from their skills and the better effort caused by more responsibility for the workers. All these improvements seem to be rolled back. According to this article on “Spiegel online” (unfortunately only in German available), a silent revolution in the automotive production takes places. No one really wants to talk about this change back to stupid hand movements in the production, as everyone know that it is a step back to times which seemed to be overcome. According to the article this silent revolution can’t be stopped as it improves productivity as well as quality.
Magnus believe in merging synergies and group work seems not to be successful in the automotive mass production. I already had the same impression as I work daily wise in the quality division of Mercedes Benz Trucks, that the work of assembly line works will be dammed to be boring, stupid and monotone again with cycle times of 400 units a day. In my opinion this is not a desirable change. For sure life quality at the workplace is traded off against productivity in this case. But it should be considered that all this will cause costs as the asset of human manpower is exhausted my monotone movements. For
sure no one can do the same movement 400 times a day for 45 years. I used to work at the assembly line during summer holidays to make some good money, but now I really hope I will never have to get back to the line.
Enough for today, got to go to the next course soon ;-)
Schinne
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