technizzel

Written by: Ben Jabbawy, Cornell University

Speaking of OR…Just heard from my friend Julie Singer, currently a senior at Cornell, majoring in Operations Research Engineering. Julie spent a summer interning for L’Oreal USA in their manufacturing plant in Piscataway, NJ. Oh Yeah, she’s also a mean surfer on the weekends. She learned how to surf while abroad in Australia during her junior year.

Here’s what she had to say about her experience at L’Oreal:

I studied the assembly lines and made changes to the processes to make them more efficient, spending the majority of my summer working on a format rationalization project.

PROBLEM: This manufacturing plant produced their products in over 50 different types of bottles, tubes, and jars. The assembly lines had too much “downtime” because it took a while to adjust the machinery for each different package. My job was to study these packages and suggest which ones could be eliminated in order to reduce the number of assembly line change-overs that had to take place.

SOLUTION: I met with packaging engineers to find out why products were packaged using certain materials and any other constraints. ThenI discussed the average demand of each product with the finance department. By creating a database of the different products and their respective packages, the dimensions and material of the package, and the average yearly production, I was able to suggest about 15 that could be eliminated and have their products packaged differently. The changes were expected to result in a 5% increase in production for the manufacturing plant. I learned a ton about manufacturing and the consumer products industry and as a perk, got tons of free products and a major discount on all their other brands!

Written by: Ben Jabbawy, Cornell University

“Don’t Forget to memorize the Krebs Cycle for this week’s exam…”

What’s so funny about this quote, which I’m sure all of you will hear from your science teachers at some point, is that everyone in the class, myself included, was too busy packing up our bags and shuffling our folders, just aching to escape our dreadful biology class. Why should I care about how to convert carbs into usable energy? Once I make it back to the cafeteria to hang out with my friends and listen to Snoop, I’ll finally thank Mr. Krebs, whoever he is…

If you’re anything like us at Technizzel, you’re probably sick of learning science through boring, smelly text books, with images of scientists and experiments older than America itself. What about the cool stuff? What’s inside an ipod? Who is responsible for designing new cell phones? What the heck is a carbon nanotube? How does an MRI actually work?

These are issues we all find interesting, yet we never seem to learn about them. Although you all probably assume engineers wear big, dorky, thick glasses and have pocket protectors for all their pens, We assure you you are wrong. Only 90% of engineers do (chuckle). Today, engineers are so much more than what your physics text books illustrates. Learn with us as we explore the companies and individuals working on the science and technologies of tomorrow.