QVCC instructor takes lessons from jobsite to classroom

Jakob Spjut in the Light Industrial Manufacturing Lab at QVCC. Photos by D. Coffey.

On Aug. 24, Quinebaug Valley Community College instructor Jakob Spjut was fine-tuning a syllabus for his Lean Manufacturing course. His challenge was to apply the lessons he had learned at a summer externship at Whitcraft Industries so that his students could reap the rewards of what he himself had learned on the manufacturing floor. He was trying to merge theory with application and make his students the better for it.

Lean manufacturing is all about eliminating waste, he said. It's a common sense, logical and systematic way of doing something. But Spjut, who started teaching soon after receiving his engineering degree, couldn't claim hands-on experience in a manufacturing facility. This past summer he took advantage of a program funded by the National Science Foundation in order to get that experience. He spent 160 hours at Whitcraft LLC, a producer of fabricated sheet metal components for the aerospace industry.

While at the Eastford plant, Spjut learned about the components the company made and the tolerances those components were tested against. It was an experience that allowed him to apply his engineering knowledge to a specific set of problems.

“There are tight tolerances in the aerospace industry,” Spjut said. “They are very specific.” Some companies manufacture products that don't have such stringent requirements, he said, like toy manufacturers who mass-produce army men, for example. But when you're dealing with aerospace products, you have to be exact.

Spjut spent time grouping products into families or into the processes by which they were made. He organized what he called "cell groups" in order to minimize scrap, rework and duplication. He even looked at sales projections with the goal of minimizing work and waste.

When he asks his students to complete their own group projects, he'll be able to give them an example of what he had to do at Whitcraft. “I'll be able to tell them how I grouped the products and what the results were,” Spjut said.

Spjut will teach four engineering courses this semester: Lean Engineering, Engineering Statics, Pro Engineering for Designers, and Hydraulics and Pneumatics. He talked about trying to get his design students to think about lean manufacturing as part of the design criteria.

“When you design something, you solve a problem,” he said. “You fulfill a need. But you also need to think about the ease of making the product, the reliability and repeatability and the quality control requirements of manufacturing it.”

"Ideally, you want to drop something into a fixture you know is good and true to measure and QC it,” he said. “If we approach it with sensibility that we don't want it difficult to make and inspect, that's lean.”

And while not all products can be manufactured easily, the concept of lean manufacturing is still a good yardstick against which to measure the process. Spjut intends to better prepare his students for the technological requirements and needs of businesses with such an approach.