Christmas at Nokia Factory!!

Just when I thought I would have an off day esp. being Christmas and the additional excitement being that it was a weekday, I was pulled into the fray and asked to go for a stock take. For those who are not aware, a stock take is basically taking an account of the stocks ie. in simple terms it means recounting whatever has already been counted by the management and checking if it were correct. According to my friend, it is a thankless job and I whole heartedly agree with him. 

Some major disadvantages of a stock take: 

*Most of the places where we have to go for stock take tend to be away from the city. Thus it involves a lot of travel which i never prefer.

*It is grueling, physically demanding & time consuming. 

*Worst of all, we go for stock taking on holidays. It is based on the presumption that production is stopped on that day and it is ideal to do the reconciling work.

The only thing which excited me about this journey was that we were going to the Nokia Factory. I was pretty interested to know what all goes into the making of a Mobile Phone. It is also nice to say to others that I went to the factory of the biggest mobile manufacturing giant in the world. These are some of the opportunities you get only when u are working in what you call "The Big 4"!. I also had this crazy feeling in me that I would get something for sweating my toil out there in that factory. In fact I had even told a friend of mine that I would get a mobile from there when i return.:)

So I was asked to report in PWC Office at 8 AM in the morning. It was a team of 5 who were assigned to do the work. All the others except me were to be picked up on the way. I had to be early since others would be held waiting. I had slept very late and found it difficult to wake up but somehow huffed and puffed and reached office at about 8.05 AM. The driver was cleaning the car and hence we left only at 8.30 after making the necessary enquiry as to where everyone would be waiting.  

8.00 AM..The vehicle in which we commuted 

We had to travel a lot coz Nokia Factory is located further down Sri Perambathur and for keeping ourselves occupied we watched Vadivelu comedy apart from the usual kalaichifying each other which our team is famously known for. Obviously i was targeted a lot because of my so called liking for one particular "???...////" Finally we reached the premises of the Nokia Factory at about 10.30 AM. It was an amazing sight. I never could envisage that it'll be so big in size and stature. More detailed information containing facts and figures will be divulged later on in the blog. We had to wear batches to go inside the building.

  
The mind blowing Nokia Factory!

 

State of the Art Technology

 
The Cafetaria!!

Once we entered the building, we were straight away taken to the meeting room to have a discussion with the client. What I observed about the rooms was that they all had "Bird" names such as Falcon, Dove, Albatross, Robin and Seagull. We were in room Robin initially but later on shifted to Seagull because it was bigger in size. During the discussion with the client my face turned bright when he said that the entire work could be completed in solid 3 hours esp coz 5 of us were around to do the counting.
Inside room Seagull 

We were supposed to start at 12.But somehow as usually happens everywhere in India, procrastination set in and we began the work only at 2 after having our lunch. No mistake on our part though, it was the client who delayed us by making us wait for so long. It was decided that me and another team member would be seeing iHub (mainly concerning Raw Materials), another 2 would be seeing WIP(segregated as Engineering and Assembly) and our Audit head would be taking care of Finished Goods. We were not allowed to take our cellphones into the location. We had to wear jackets to go into the location. We were given to understand that normal clothing was sensitive because of some technical reason. Inside the iHub i had to check 30 Samples & all of them related to items such as spare Parts, chips etc. Most of the items we were not even allowed to touch & the employee there made the counting in front of us.

I even had figured out 2 issues:
1)A particular material was not there in the desired location. Later on came to find that it was a manual data error as instead of typing the location as "01",it was typed as "10"
2)In a particular location where they had stored some chips, the no. of boxes containing the chips noted by them was 165 and i found 170 which was a human error.

  
Me wearing the Nokia Jacket 

We completed our work in the iHub division at about 5.30 & had gone in to check what the others were doing. Each division was so huge in size that it was looking like a maze. Even contacting each other was not possible coz our cellphones were locked in the locker. We were checked at every stage from pillar to post. It was worse than in an airport. Finally when we wrapped up our work, it was about 10 PM in the night. The reason for the delay was because there were lots of issues in the Assembly division. We were all too tired by then & could barely control our hunger. On the way we ate in a hotel called "Motel Highway". After that one by one, everyone were dropped at their respective houses and at the time i reached office it was 12 in the night.

Information 

*It is the 2nd biggest Nokia Factory in the World after the one in its headquarters Finland.

*The last months production(November) reached a record 10 Million.

*The entire factory is built on an area spanning a massive 210 Acres.

*There are roughly about 7000 Workers in this factory. 

*Most of the revenue is generated in India(60-70%) and there are also exports to certain countries like Taiwan, Thailand etc.

Conclusion
It was 16 hours of a different experience which i can never imagine. Never in my wildest dreams would I be envisioning that I would be spending a holiday this way. My crazy feeling didn't work out and I didn't get anything on return for my sweat and toil but the bottom line was that i got to spend an adventurous and eventful journey. An experience i can never forget!
12 AM Midnight 26th December : PWC office
 
Another night picture of office