My Internship at Cummins Rocky Mount Engine Plant

We asked our students who were interning over the summer to share there experience through a blog post. Here is what Kriti Gena, a graduate research assistant, masters student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and member of the Ohio State EcoCAR Mobility Challenge team has to say about her experience at Cummins Rocky Mount Engine Plant.

This summer I am working at Cummins Rocky Mount Engine Plant (RMEP). RMEP manufactures on-highway (automotive) and off-highway diesel engines. They currently manufacture 750 engines per day. I first heard about Cummins when I was working with Bosch in India, as Cummins was one of the biggest customers for Bosch’s injectors which were being manufactured in India that time. It was so cool to see the injectors at the assembly line when I came to work for Cummins. The loop of supplier to customer started making more sense. RMEP has more than 530 customers across the globe and 420+ supplier including in India, China and Japan. Due to such an extensive and broad supplier and customer base, the plant has one of the biggest supply chains.

My position this summer is Supply Chain Planning Intern in the materials department. The materials department is responsible for the material movement from supplier to warehouse, warehouse to line side, and from finished goods to the customer warehouse. I have been working on material movement from the warehouse to line side. I am working on two projects; PIV (Powered industrial Vehicle) in-plant management and cycle time study with returnable packaging of the critical station.

There are currently 84 PIVs across the plant with no standardized workflow and management. My project is to make a standardized work flow and then check the feasibility of a dynamic flow, much like Uber. My second project, cycle time study of the critical station is to reduce the cycle time. On this station there are two operators working at the same time across each other. Line side inventory is high, and it has ergonomic risks to the operator too. There is also high dunnage at the station. For this purpose, I am working on returnable packaging from the supplier, improving 5s of the station and visual Kanban as trigger for material flow. I like the work as it is application of what I had studied in Dr. Posner’s Operations Research class with the principles of management and what I learned during my time as the project manager for Ohio State EcoCAR team.

During my internship in North Carolina, I got to experience a new state and its landscapes. I went to a few beaches (my first after coming to the United States a year back), new cities like Raleigh and Charlotte, and new food chains like Cookout. Rocky Mount is a small town but is just an hour drive away from Raleigh which is a great city.

Cummins is a great company to work for. There are a bunch of intern activities planned throughout the summer, including an intern talk with the COO Tom Linebarger. Later this month we will go to Columbus, Indiana for a visit to the company’s headquarters. This internship is providing me with a lot of opportunities to experience the material flow for a product like engine with its depth of machining and assembly process.