Tsang's RISE Trip

Work and Henkel Facility Tour (week of Aug 13)

Work has been back to the same ol' trial and error of parameter guess and check. But I am trying more ambitious things now, varying more of the code that I have a better grasp of these days. Due to the nature of the random number generators in the code, I am relying on modifying the weighting factors of the parameters to get the highest probability of a good result.

On Wednesday (Aug. 16) I went to Dusseldorf for my invited tour of the Henkel facility. Henkel is a HUGE player here in Germany that is similar to Proctor and Gamble or Johnson and Johnson. They manufacture a large number of personal and homecare goods in addition to industrial products such as adhensives. You might recognize the brands got2b and pritt. Mainly, I think I've seen some of the bottles of haircare/skincare products around but I don't use enough of it to know. We saw the production and packaging facility for their hotmelt product used by companies such as CocaCola to put the labels on their bottles. Like most plants in Germany, the majority of the labour was automatic to save on costs of labour. It was really cool to see all the components work together from cooling the product, to packing the product into boxes and further on to palattes. After an amazing lunch of salmon and fresh salads, and a nice coffee, we split up and I went off with the chemical process engineer who was with us. We chatted about work and the issues I would face in the work environment after being in school. He showed me the development path of projects and take note here, Queen's students, they used TRIZ and other design processes I learned about in APSC 381. I got to tour his lab work area and saw a lot of the microreactors that were apparently all the rage now in industry where they ran tests and were trying to get a pilot scale plant project approved. It really was quite interesting.

A funny thing a fellow RISE student and I noticed were how immaculate all the Henkel employees looked. The guys were all dressed in fashionable suits as were the ladies, but their hair were all spikes giving the look of those cheesy haircare commercials. I guess they all believe in their product and have to "wear" it to work like a GAP employee.

After this, I was shown to the gate and given my gift bag (containing various skincare/haircare products and industrial adhesives) and sent home. Again, acousted by a fare checker, apparently if you buy a ticket from a machine in the station, you don't have to stamp the ticket, but if you buy a ticket from the machine IN the train you are on, you have to stamp the ticket....in case you wanted to get on the train and then get off....no common sense whatsoever.

posted by ktsang @ 2:47 PM