After half a year at the new company, it's my first time attending new employee training. Honestly, at the beginning I was resistant. Although the location is in our office's meeting room, which is already quite fortunate compared to people from the Xizhi factory who have to take official leave to come for classes, but the time is from 1 pm to 4 pm for a full three hours, which for production management is basically prime working time just gone! Normally, at 1:30 there's a material shortage meeting, and on Wednesdays at 2 pm there's the weekly PM meeting, and this day everything clashes, plus I have a bunch of anomalies on my production line burning, my only thought was: 'If I go, I'll definitely have to work overtime like crazy.'
But my supervisor just said 'you still go,' so I had to obediently report.
After actually participating, it was completely different from what I thought! The entire training went from the factory layout, each process location, all the way to the actual production line, directly walking to the side of the machines to look, it really felt like a field trip. Although I had previously worked as an engineering assistant in the PCB industry and handled outsourced PCB boards, because at that time we didn't have a factory, it was all outsourced to manufacturers with factories, so I had never seen how the actual boards are produced. Although SMT and MI are processes that start from the bare boards for the latter stages, I hadn't actually seen their processes before. This time was the first time I saw more completely how the boards go from loading, solder printing, component placement, testing, and so on, all the way to QC inspection. Many terms that originally only existed in emails or reports suddenly had visuals.
Although the tour also covered the system line I am responsible for, since I usually stay there, I roughly know what each workstation is doing, so relatively speaking, there's not as much novelty. However, it's the understanding of the front-end processes that gave me a clearer concept of the entire production flow's continuity, and also helped me understand why if some boards are delayed, the whole string gets stuck.
After walking the whole thing, my feet were really sore, but my mind was full.
Thinking about it now, the value of this kind of education and training isn't in teaching you a brand new skill, but in connecting the fragmented things you already know. In daily work, the information we receive is very piecemeal: material shortages today, anomalies tomorrow, rush deliveries the day after, every thing is urgent, but there's rarely time to step back and look at 'what the entire process looks like.' And this kind of training forces you to pause what you're doing and look at how the company operates from a higher perspective.
For production management, this is actually very important. Because we make decisions every day: how to schedule, which order to prioritize, which to delay; if you only look at surface numbers, it's easy to just end up moving work orders around; but when you know what's happening behind the processes, your judgments will have more basis and you'll be less likely to step on landmines.
I originally thought these three hours were just a burden disrupting my work rhythm, but it turned out to be a gap that let me fill in my understanding. Although there is a cost: meetings have to be rescheduled, things still need to be done, and overtime probably can't be avoided, but at least this trip wasn't in vain.
Some things, when you're too busy to understand them normally, you can only make up for it in these 'forced to slow down' moments; that's probably the meaning of education and training's existence.