Training Week 2 : Yield

There was a day less this week as Monday was a public holiday for Negeri Sembilan in conjunction with Ishak and Mikraj. Negeri and I think, Perlis are the only two states that have a day off. Work started as usual with more reviewing of the codes of the Yield Module. I was going through the codes for the modules and tried to relate it back to the forms that were created to see the relation between them. Initially, I was having a hard time understanding them and decided to do it on the first day this week. I have roughly understood the relation of the module and work at trying to tie everything together.

Philips would be having an internal IT auditing session during this past few days. As it is a multinational company, staff from other countries would be making their way here to check on the IT facilities in the Seremban factory to see whether it meet the standards set upon. Computers would need to have legal software installed. The network would need to check to see whether intruders are able to penetrate into the companies files and data. According to Mr. Elfiz, one of the way this is done is to set up a ghost in the network to check the system and also to trace any illegal files besides the manual check on the computers itself. The auditing team comprise of staff from Hong Kong and Norway. Seeing that it was a thorough inspection, I decided not to bring my laptop to the office to do my work as illegal softwares were applenty in my computer. Besides that, Pei Chin and myself decided to shift our computers to the maintenance department in the line for safekeeping although I did not use mine due to lack of keyboard and mouse. It was better to be safe than sorry.

As there was not much that I could do without a computer, I decided to take a step of courage to approach my "Boss", Mr. Soo for work. I had been more in touch with my supervisor, Mr Elfiz compared to Mr. Soo as he seems to be a more friendly and sitting nearer to me. On the other hand, Mr. Soo seem to be a very busy guy and who does not seem to be as friendly from the response I receive to the smiles given to him. Mr. Soo is considered more in authority compared to Mr. Elfiz as he is the Quality Assurance (QA) Session Manager but both of them are actually working on this module which I have been assigned to. Therefore, I have two supervisors during my internship here at Philips.

I waited for him to come into office on Thurday morning to approach him as I was not able to do so the day before as there were alot of people around him. My initial reaction of an unfriendly encounter turned out the opposite as he seem to be very much obliging when I asked him for work and also updated him briefly on what I have been doing during the pass week. At that moment he had not much of work that he could give me to do except told me to do some research on other programs that are out in the market to get a general idea of how to improve or implement an interface which would be user friendly and easy to use by the customers. Customers seem to be the term use to indicate the people who would be using the program. This would include people from the engineering, manufacturing, QA and logistic department of the company. He gave me an overall description of the whole project and explain that the Yield Module would be solely done by trainees and he wanted to implented a handshake system whereby trainees are able to pass down the work that they have completed to the next person to continue as smoothly as possible. Mr. Soo indicated that the entire project will be develop in the span of 2 years before it is tested and implemented in the line. If the project is successful, there would be no need for operators to record the amount of input and output on pieces of paper before keying them in manually into the computer for record keeping. Engineers on the other hand would not need to go into the line to obtained information that they need which are not provided in their daily report of the line. Data on the input and output from every machine at every phase of the line would be fed into the database and recorded. The Yield module would be directly connected to the database and engineers would only need to open up the program and extract all the information they need regarding about the yield from the database to their computers. This would reduce the number of manual keying in of data and increase the efficient of obtaining the an almost perfect data without any error that may be cause due to workers negligence.

The entire project seem to very interesting as it would be a fully computerized module to obtain the yield. However, I would only be working on the interface of the program to make it more user friendly. Other trainees that would come after me would have the priviledge to improve on the current database and interface the machine with the database and link the program with it to obtain the information needed, most probably in real-time. I decided to start work on going through the report again and to see which part of the current program that I could change to make it more user friendly. At the moment, I did not have a solid interface idea that I could implement it from scratch. However, I planned to use back the current interface at the moment and try to add some new features that would allow the customers to obtain any information they need from only a click of a button. Mr. Soo asked me to obtain the sheet of data that the engineers receive every morning from Kak Zura. I obtained the daily and monthly data for her so that I could go through the types of data that were relevant to the customers needs. Besides that, he also ask me to approach people from different areas of the line the type of information that would be useful to them. I decided to ask Mr. Elfiz who was nearest to me and he mentioned that the program must be able to assist them to obtain information regarding about the yield from every machine or anywhere from the line.

After obtaining all the information needed, I began to work on the current interface starting with the the main menu and trying to add more data that the customers will be able to obtain that would be similar to the daily data sheet. My initial plan to do the interface face complete with roll over which was similar to what has been seems to be in vain as the codes seem to encounter some errors. I though for a while on it and decided to only concentrate on the interface or how the program will look like before I add in any fancy approach to the program or write the codes for its function. My plan is to come out with the interface of the whole project and present it to my supervisor for his views and recommendation before starting work on the technical side of it. This was to reduce any redundacy that may occur in completing the program. My supervisor had not given me a clear idea of how he wants it to function and the best that I could do is to do snap shots of the program and explain it to him the functionality of the project so that he will be able to visualise it and have an idea of the program before giving me his idea. Working without anything visually can be difficult and for now I planned to meet what the eye sees before what the program should to to meet the eye's needs.

Work ended slightly early on Friday as the company was going to have a annual dinner that night. Besides that, the production line would be stop. I was suppose to go for the dinner in the beginning after getting approval from the person in charge, Kak Tarmiza. However, after much discussion, they told me that I could not go and appologise to me about it. I must say that I was little disappointed as I was looking forward to attend my first company dinner after Ah Fong told me about it. Anyway, it was not a big thing for me to not go although going would be an added advantage for me. Everyone seem to be pretty excited over the whole affair ever since I step into Philips two weeks ago. Clerks beside me had been busy talking about the prizes for the lucky draw and what they wanted to win if they were lucky ones selected. Other than that, work seem to come to a standstill after lunch as most of the workers were already hanging around and talking among themselves about the dinner. Some of the higher rank personnel had already gone home after lunch. Those stayed back were just visiting each other cubicle and enjoying a hearty conversation that caught my attention. There was not much to be done as the line was close and it was much more sensible to return home rather than do nothing. On the other hand, I was busy with my work and stayed up till 4pm before I left back home in the midst of a drizzle.