Operations Research in Action
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!
