The PROMAP Manufacturing Learning Series

Back when I was still working, I've always been keen to observe how the industry operates both in the macro and micro scale, and I must say that I sure have learned a lot in 5 years. I liked the customer meetings because it allowed me to take a peek on what our customers problems were, and how multinational companies related to each other. I also liked the production floor meetings and chatting with operators, technicians, and facility personnel because I liked to learn how things operate at their end. Being a process engineer granted us that advantage and I tried to learn all I could from it.

And so in spite of my resignation last year, I wanted to keep myself updated somehow. This time though, I already had the time to look beyond the semiconductor industry.  Fortunately, I bumped into Dr. Richard Chu from the UP Eng'g, Chemical Engineering department, and the adviser of my college org Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He mentioned that the senior professional chapter had an upcoming seminar about Rootcause Analysis, so I decided to come last July 5 just to check it out.

The organizer is actually a sister-organization of ours, the Production and Operations Management of the Philippines (PROMAP). They're a non-profit organization that seeks to help out manufacturing companies by providing trainings and activities that elevate manufacturing methods to be at par with industry standards. This is especially beneficial for small and medium enterprises that cannot yet afford to have their own in-house training. It's a long series of trainings aimed at updating people on different knowledge fields of manufacturing.

The training material and my certificate (wrongly spelled unfortunately meheh)

It's a pity I missed the name of the speaker, but it was a pretty good training, and much of the situations used were those of the food and beverage industry so it's something new for me (the speaker used to work for San Miguel). Learning modules were provided for and best of all, there was free food. Haha. For a training fee of only Php630 person, it's a really great deal. It was a room of almost 30 people coming from different companies. I realized that there's a difference in root cause analysis approach between semiconductor and food manufacturing plants. The former is more intensive and statistics-heavy, while the latter is more simplified and straightforward. The key really is in the implementation and cooperation from everyone  on the production floor.

It's interesting to get to view things from these kinds of perspectives. I hope PROMAP gets to extend it's reach to more smaller companies, to also help prepare them for the ASEAN integration in 2015. They have a Facebook page that you can contact for more info. :)