Beyond the Snuggle Room

Well today is my last day working for Unilever (for the time being lets hope, haha). And I just wanted to take a brief moment to reflect on my time here.

On my first day on the job at orientation in Trumbull, CT, I was taking a break from our morning session. As I stood out in the hallway I noticed one room was labeled, the Snuggle Room. A million questions jumped into my head. What could they possibly do in there?? What kind company is this? What did I just get myself into??? So I looked at the next room over and noticed it was labeled the Lipton Room. Then it hit me, Snuggle was the brand (which they've since sold), not the action! I found this became a good lesson for starting any new journey. Things might look strange and uncomfortable at first, but look beyond the Snuggle Room and see things for what they are. You are starting a great opportunity to grow and learn, don't let one little thing stop you now.

Fast forward six months.

I have had a wonderful time here with Unilever. I felt my work interesting and meaningful, which says a lot for a company if they treat their interns with such respect. I enjoyed working with everyone and Clearwater and the great networking opportunities with those I've met in other locations. I had a fabulous relationship with my manager, she gave me the freedom to create my own programs and exceed my expectations, and she always gave me a warm, welcoming smile. I will really miss everyone here and it will certainly be an adjustment to make coming back to school. I look forward to working with any of these great people again, and I hope that I can find a place within Unilever (maybe in the midwest this time) in the future.

Thank you all for following my blog and watching me grow.

Presentation Skills

Next week all the co-ops will get together in Trumbull one last time and present what we've been doing and how it's benefited Unilever. We have ten minutes to present and three minutes for Q&A. No big deal, right? Oh, did I mention our audience? Instead of the original plan of having co-ops and a few managers in the room listening to us, we will now be presenting to a room full of directors and vice presidents, no other co-ops allowed. It definitely pumps up one's nerves, but it's also more exciting this way! Don't get me wrong, I am quite nervous for this presentation, but it's now much more of a big deal, makes a little co-op feel special, haha. So here are a few tips to prepare for the big presentation:

- Start early! You should try to give yourself at least three weeks to prepare, at one week for designing and the rest of your time to practice.

- Yes, practice. You need to practice, practice, practice. If you ever find yourself lacking motivation to practice, remind yourself that this presentation is huge, you do not want to appear unprepared.

- Start like you're living in the Roaring Twenties! Well, I don't mean rebel against conventional modest fashion, but rather, forget the computer. Turn off the screen of life and take out a pad of paper and pen. Write down key ideas, headlines, and even a mock-up of what you're going to say. Often when creating presentations we get so wound up focusing on design elements, like what slide background to use, we forget the important stuff like the content.

- It's all about you. It's not about what fancy animation you have on your slides, so keep it simple when it comes to design. You want your audience focusing on you, your words, and your message. Your slides are there for a supporting pictures or for emphasizing a few words now and then.

- Practice, practice, practice. Practice in front of a camera so you know exactly how others see you. You're your biggest critic so be nice, but be honest. Once you're comfortable, and definitely a week before game day, practice in front of others and request their feedback.

- Know your audience and when you're going to present. Keep it interesting by using demos or multi-media.

- On the day of the presentation, relax. It's ok to be nervous, it shows that you care, but just take a breath and talk at a normal pace. If you get off track, take a deep breath, collect your thoughts, and move on. Try to think of it as fun, remember that you love giving presentations and showing yourself off to upper management!

Pre-Wrap Up

As the semester comes to an end at State, everyone's busy with finals and I myself have a few things to do for EGR 393, my experiential education class. Although my co-op ends in June, I will do a little pre-wrap up now for those involved with EGR 393.

I initially entered my co-op with the notion that I would be doing risk assessments, a method of evaluating the possible risks of hazards that are generated in a location, from a task, or from a machine. I ended up completing my tasked list of risk assessments within about 3 weeks, my manager expected it to take 6 months. So now what? I did a bunch of training available through Unilever, I learned a lot more about supply chain and about the business practices of Unilever - this is a great benefit from working for a large company. I also was able to dip into my creativity and design two employee motivational programs while I was here. The first was based of the Olympics, with themed events like a poster contest and a race for safe ideas, it went on during the Olympics to remind workers to think safe as they saw The Games on TV that night. The second, which is still going on, is a challenge to report more near misses - events which could have resulted in injury - and change those situations quickly so it won't happen again. For the next month I will continue to do risk assessments on new products and I will continue to advocate the Near Miss Challenge. My main hurdle right now is to prepare for our final presentation on June 3rd, 10 minutes alone in a room with directors and VP's explaining what we've done for the past six months and how Unilever benefited. I'm nervous already, but I'm starting to prepare now, by June 3rd I will be ready.

I have had such a wonderful experience working for Unilever, it is an opportunity I would recommend to anyone. I was very pleased to find a career choice I can see myself doing and have some initial practice with it in a real working environment. I have mentioned before that although I definitely am set on a chemical engineering degree, I want it more for the background and less for the actual engineering of chemicals. Safety allows me to do just that, it's a field where technical background is required, but it really has nothing to do with chemical engineering. I am so thankful Unilever chose me for this program and introduced me to safety, I now plan on taking some OSHA classes before graduation to further my career in safety.

The Near Miss Challenge

As safety professionals, we need to deal with three different situations: near misses, first aid injuries, and recordable injuries. Where the latter two are easier to understand, the concept of a near miss may be less so. So what is a near miss? A near miss is a situation where an injury could have occurred. Near misses are the shocking points of our day where a car nearly hits us, or you dropped a plate right next to your foot. When we record near misses and take corrective actions to ensure the event will not occur again, we reduce our chance of getting injured. That being said, whenever there is a near miss in the plant, we want to know immediately and we want to fix it fast. I created a program, similar to the Safety Olympics, in which employees can fill out a form reporting just the near miss for 1 point, offering a solution for 2 points, and even going further and answering a series of why-did-this-happen questions for 3 points. Points can accumulate until a recordable injury occurs, at that time (or before at the discretion of the employee) all points must be "spent" on fun prizes, like embroidered Unilever blankets or free pint of Ben & Jerry's coupons. When employees report a near miss, I immediately record it in a spreadsheet, which I've designed to be continued far after I leave here, and then email the near miss and offered solution to all the managers, expressing the need for a quick response. So far this program is amazing. After only starting it two weeks ago, I have already had 16 entries turned in. Likewise, the response time by the managers is always within an hour and most near miss cases are closed within a week. I am so proud of this program and I am happy to have found a solution that works well for our plant. I know that this new found awareness of near misses will really reduce the hazards around us and keep our workplace safe :)

Back to Risk Assessments

In my location we are undergoing a lot of changes, both in management positions, and in improvement processes. Although most of Unilever already uses the modern system of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), a wonderful strict guideline for really focusing on the small things and improving processes, the ice cream division of Unilever was brought closer into the company last year -previously governed under their own headquarters. That being said, when it came time to doing Focused Improvement training, a system that the co-ops are expected to work off of, my location didn't really know what to make of it. So I finally got my training when I realized I had no idea what Focused Improvement was at the Midpoint Event, I reached out to the co-op coordinator and she put me in touch with a trainer. I reviewed the decks she sent and everything makes so much more sense now! So now I'm going back over my risk assessments and putting them into legible graphs, locating exactly what needs to be targeted to improve - hence "Focused Improvement". The weird part of all of this is though, is that I know all these FI (Focused Improvement) methods that no other manager has seen, or they are just hearing about it. So it's really weird to now balance the fact that I know a lot of the modern Unilever methods of thinking that the rest of this facility is just starting to grasp. What this means for me though is that I'm looking at my work in a whole new way, it's given me a lot of insight on how to now take the data I've collected and do something with it.

A Quick Tip

Just wanted to share a quick smart tip I learned at the Midpoint Event:

Ladies, always carry an extra scarf with you when giving a presentation, now you'll have something to cover up an embarrassing spill or stain if it should happen!

Midpoint Event

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was in Connecticut, for our co-op Midpoint Event. It was a nice trip and it was great to see everyone again! It's funny how those three days of connecting in the beginning of our co-op made lasting friendships, we all continue to communicate with an instant messaging program between Unilever. At the Trumbull facility, we took a tour of research and development (R&D), which was really cool! I've always swayed away from R&D as a career, because I'm not sure if I want to be stuck in a lab all day running experiments. However, we got to see process research which was so cool! Of course they have to research how they're going to make the product on a large scale, and those researchers also get to travel a lot to plants and perform trial runs. So the idea of R&D has definitely opened back up for me. On Wednesday we traveled out to Clinton, CT, and got to tour the original Pond's factory. It was awesome! I'm so used to the ice cream world, smaller, hand packed, older, so seeing the automated lines, one even had a robot(!), was amazing! At the end of the day we practiced our presentations for the final event which will be in June. Practice most certainly makes perfect and I definitely need to get my presentation perfected for when it counts :)

AMMMMMMMMS

Really it's AMMS, which is a CMMS for doing PM's. Right. So AMMS stands for Automatic Maintenance Management System, which is really a CMMS: Computer Maintenance Management System, for doing PM's, or preventative maintenance. Laymen's terms: a computer program that automatically tells you when to do preventative maintenance on a piece of equipment - maintenance to prevent a break. And why am I writing about all these crazy acronyms? Well that's because I just started using AMMS to help design our site's PM program. Which although it's not as cool as a Gucci fashion show, is pretty neat! I'm learning a new-to-me computer program and I'm working on something that will save the company money, because it's better to run the line as scheduled instead of having to stop and wait for a broken machine to get repaired. It's a little frustrating just because the program doesn't contain normal shortcuts, like ctl+f for finding an entry, so I have to just look through all the entries for something, but like I said, I think it's pretty cool to do.

More Risk Assessments!

I'm doing more risk assessments, whoopee! haha. I don't mind, I actually enjoy doing them, I think it's really neat to evaluate area/equipment/task and determine the possible risk of exposure. As I mentioned, I've already completed risk assessments on all the lines on the production floor, now I'm doing every product specifically on a line. So if one line has five different products it can run, I will do five separate risk assessments in addition to the one I've already done on the line. If one product runs on several lines, I will still do it per line, so there will be multiple options for that one product. Largely all I do is copy/paste from the original line assessment and figure out if there's anything new or any changes. However, I have spent a lot of time making it easier to go out on the floor with a guide to determine changes resulting from the different product. To do so, I've gone back to my original assessments and established baseline products - common products for that line that reflect normal use of stationary equipment. For instance, on Polar, a production line, Original Klondike bars are the baseline product. I designed several spreadsheets that progress through the line as I would on the production floor (mix tanks to boxes) to make it easier to note changes. Sometimes we run Reese's Klondike bars on Polar, the main difference here is the barrels of peanut butter and the chopped up pieces of Reese's cups that are added into the product. Because of the two additives, there are three new tasks that need to be added and one new piece of equipment. All the changes go into the master spreadsheet with the baseline product assessment so when I go on the floor with the print out, I can just reference the correct number. Pretty cool stuff.

An update

They say no news is good news... Well I guess that's true, nothing essentially bad is happening, but nothing too great either. I find I really miss being with friends, I feel really alone down here. Often I think if I had a car things would be better, I could get to the beach easier, I could join a community sports team, but the truth is, I don't have a car, and I'm not getting one. So here I am. Work is going well, I'm currently waiting for tomorrow for a meeting with a coworker to map my risk analysis onto a new system of safety maps. That's really all I have to write about, hopefully a more substantial topic surfaces this week.