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UBC Faculty of Forestry > Student Stories > Ruotong Liu (Wood Products)

Ruotong Liu (Wood Products)

December 4, 2023 | Author: Tripti

Production Coordinator Co-op with Builders Door and Window Supply

UBC Forestry Co-op Student Ruotong, working at his office desk.

At the start of my co-op term at Builders Door & Window, I was very lucky to work on a process improvement project that significantly impacted the company’s operations. In this project, I conducted time studies and wrote a process flowchart to analyze the whole manufacturing process. From this project, I found that the former labour time sheet which is used to quantify the total labour costs has a variance from reality. The management valued this result and responded to it with agility, adjusting the system and communicating the change to the quote system of the company.
 
Besides the projects, one of my primary routes is related to the product calculator, which was written by one of Wood Products Processing alumni named Michael. He wrote thousands of VBA codes to build up the whole system, generating BOMs and Production instruments by the product configurations, and providing the price based on the materials and labour. My work is to maintain the pricing system, including checking the code, repairing bugs, providing new features, and updating our cost to ensure all quotations are accurate. This work pushed me beyond the theoretical realms of my studies, demanding practical application and innovative problem-solving. Being a production coordinator means being at the forefront of processing and distributing orders to the production staff. That improves my production management skills. I found myself coordinating various complicated tasks to achieve seamless manufacturing processes. Although never perfect, solving every problem in the production lines, assisted by my supervisors, gave me a better understanding of the manufacturing system, which can be a real booster of my career.
 
Additionally, I found that almost every course with “WOOD” has been applied to this coop term. I used knowledge from WOOD 245 (Programming for Wood Products Manufacturing Applications) to write and check the VBA codes of the product calculator, I used the design skills from WOOD 485(Furniture Construction) to generate the shop drawings of products and the industrial engineering knowledge learnt from WOOD 330 (Industrial Engineering) gives me a big picture of process improvement and manufacturing systems. Therefore, this valuable co-op term wasn’t just about acquiring technical skills-it was a holistic learning experience that blurred the lines between theory and practice. I really enjoyed it!

Posted in: Student Stories, Wood Products
Tagged with: Co-op, Forestry Co-op, Student Stories, Wood Products Processing

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