Internship-Week 1

After my resume and attended a brief interview, I was officially aninternship member of Polymatech Malaysia located at HICOM Industrial Area, Shah Alam. Assigned to the Hybrid Damper Department (HBD) headed by Mr. Anand, engineer, his duty for me is to attempt to establish Total Product Management/Total Process Management (TPM). Well, he din't told me anything at that time only instructed me to check it out on wiki which I dutifully did (don't want to bored u with the details here). At the same time, he advises me to be aware of my safety. It's my duty to follow the rules and regulations of the work area.

As the name of the department suggested, the main production is a component namely hybrid damper. From explanation I obtained on that day and combined with further research, the hybrid damper is used mainly in car radio to absorb vibration and ensure smooth usage of the car radio. The term hybrid arise from its composition of 2 different material, Polypropylene Thermoplastic aka PP and Thermoplastic Elastomer aka TPE. However, the common name used in the industry originated from Japan- damper=Hontai and cover=Futa, for consistency purposes onwards only the Japanese name will be used. Below are some picture of finished product for company such as Kenwood and JVC. On the lower left is the Futa while the Hontai is on the lower right of the topmost picture.

There are 8 assembly lines in total for production of hybrid damper and most of them are automated, but operator assistance is required since the the machine's control system is set up to alert operators of No Good (NG) products due to failure of meeting requirements be it in weight or height and require manual override of the system. Another situation that requires operator is due to the fact mechanical vibration and other problems halts smooth operation from time to time, which require minor and sometimes major maintenance effort.

Hence, one of my main task is also the most basic knowledge taught to every single operator in the area --> to reset the system so that it is up and running again. Next, I was taught to perform simple maintenance operation on a component known as grease dispenser in which grease is the medium inside the hybrid damper absorbing vibrations. Well, it's not as hard as it sounds since it mainly involves disassembling the component and clean up all the excess grease before reassembling it up again, while the tricky part lies in replacing washers in hard to reach area. Last but not least, I was taught how to obtain and record down assembly machine settings which must be conducted daily for reference purposes in times of breakdown.

In short, it is exhilarating to participate in actual manufacturing process first hand rather than reading it up on textbook. So, the first week left me wanting more action.