Virgo

Today was our first day at Virgo.  Almost immediately, we were given cups of tea, the first of many.  It is excellent tea - black tea with a lot of milk, spices, sugar, and a little ground ginger - and it seems like we get a fresh cup every couple of hours.  I could live like this...

We met with Ajay in a conference room to talk about the company, identify problems, and generate a project for Robert and I to execute over the next two months.  One major problem that Ajay described was a lack of unified, clear-cut priorities throughout the manufacturing process.  As it stands, the system is prone to change whenever a customer calls to demand that their order be given priority, and different managers may give the same floor supervisor conflicting instructions within minutes of eachother.  One manager may come to the paint shop, see that valves from order B are loaded, and say "wait a minute, order A is sitting here and it is far more important - switch the orders, do order A first."  The floor supervisor complies, and a few minutes later while he's painting the valves from A, a different manager may appear and say "wait a minute, what are you doing? Order B is far more important than order A - do that one first!"  As you can imagine, efficiency suffers.

Robert and I were very interested by this problem.  We considered a few other options for projects, but in the end we realized that our biggest contribution to the company is a fresh viewpoint, not any kind of technical skill.  Also, here at Virgo we are presented with an opportunity to practice and learn skills related to the management of companies, skills we cannot really gain experience in at Rice.  Thus, we stand to offer the greatest value to the company as well as to ourselves by directing ourselves towards problem solving that requires fresh thinking and gives us experience we would not normally get at Rice.  Enter process engineering and planning.

We have decided to create a program that will automatically prioritize all orders within the manufacturing system based upon quantitative characteristics such as the deadline (contractural delivery date, or CDD, is the industry term), manufacturing capabilities, raw material availability, and profit to the company.  We wrote up a one-page proposal for IT, since neither Robert nor I have any programming experience and we will need their help to implement; tomorrow morning we will meet with them and pitch the idea.

After lunch (chicken sandwiches and sweet corn soup), we learned an interesting Indian practice.  After meals, you chew fennel seeds, which taste like liquorice, and they clean your palette.  At restaurants they may bring out a bowl of seeds, sometimes candy- or mint-coated, and people grab a handful to chew.

In the preliminary excitement about our project, Robert and I ended up working until 6pm, an hour more than we planned.  We hit bad traffic on the way to pick up Ray and Jose at DMH, and they ended up waiting 3 hours for us (they had finished up much earlier than us).  We'll have to find some way to sort out the carpool issue.

After work, we headed to the gym, where we got our IDs and a workout plan.  The plan looks easy - maybe a little too easy.  It only took us 30 min to finish a day's workout, and we had allotted an hour; perhaps they thought we wanted a half hour workout.  Easy or not, I'm going to stick with the plan though.  This is a great chance to work with a personal trainer and get in the habit of working out, something I have failed to do time and time again in the past.  Comic relief of the day - while I was doing cardio on the treadmill, the power went out for a minute.  The treadmills were all full, and everyone kept running while the belts stopped.  A few people almost fell over, and almost everyone (including myself) ran into the console on the front.  After the workout, we finally got home around 10, just in time for dinner before all the restaurants closed at 11.  A long day...