Industrial placement
at Proton Lighting
in Värnamo
– From the beginning we thought that improvement work was something you didn’t work with much in industry, but here it is really something you work with everywhere,’ say students Anton Engström, Divijianth Singarajah and Emil Pasovic in unison. The boys are studying to become civil engineers specialising in industrial product development at the School of Engineering in Jönköping, and for the past eight weeks they have had an industrial placement at Proton Lighting in Värnamo.
During the internship, Anton, Divijianth and Emil have worked on conducting a comprehensive study and providing suggestions for optimising the value flow for one of Exaktor’s best-selling lighting fixtures, Naiad 1200. The luminaire is manufactured in Värnamo and during the internship, the students have been on site at the factory in Värnamo and carefully measured, listened and asked questions. The work was then summarised in a report that was presented at Proton Lighting in mid-May and which suggested various steps to optimise the flow.
– Previous time studies have not taken into account the work carried out before and after the actual installation of the luminaire, now we measured everything,’ says Anton. ‘This allowed us to see which steps could be improved and which affect the total installation time. Then we also graded how complicated the changes would be to implement.
– Since the purpose of the internship is also to see how different professional roles work, we sometimes chose to divide the students so that they could work on their own, together with people from different professional roles,’ says Lena Nilsson, Head of Operations at Proton Lighting. ‘Everything from accompanying one of our salespeople out to customers to seeing how the lighting designers work. It has been very positive, both for our own staff and for the students themselves.
– No one here has ever said no when we asked if we could come along, we have always been welcome to join in,’ says Divijianth.
During the internship, the students also did a value stream mapping of an already implemented restructuring of the flow in the sheet metal department, a restructuring that has proven to save a lot of time through a smarter flow and which the students also confirmed through their measurements, some steps went almost 60% faster than before!
– During this internship, we have gained a much deeper understanding of the production process, Emil confirms.
– We are very pleased with the students’ work and we will take their evaluation with us in our upcoming improvement projects here in Värnamo, says Lena Nilsson. We manufacture about 22,000 luminaires per month here in Värnamo, and for us it is natural and important to constantly work on various improvement projects both in production and with our luminaire solutions.
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