Houston was very wet. As soon as i left the airport i was swimming in the soggy air. Now only was the weather hot and humid, but mother nature decided to throw some heavy rains our way. I saw on the local news that the showers caused all sorts of flooding over the city. Luckily, our travels weren't affected.
We had a full day of meetings on Thursday to discuss a new system to keep track of all the part numbers that go on a lift truck. This data includes labeled illustrations of major components and is used to create parts books. I learned a great deal about the manufacturing process. I also learned a whole bunch of new acronyms. It can be really hard to figure out exactly which parts are on a truck. MCFA makes a bunch of different models which can have a bunch of different variations and revisions in addition to changes resulting from engineering orders. Each truck can easily have around 5,000 part numbers. It's amazing they can track them at all.
During the question and answer part, it was a bit like attending a meeting of the United Nations. There were two gentlemen in from Japan; one of which felt comfortable communicating in English but the other one was the project manager who had all the answers. When someone from MCFA asked a question, the question had to be translated and that always took longer than i would have expected. Although i couldn't understand anything they were saying, I wouldn't be surprised that the Japanese words for "stupid americans" would sound familiar to me. While that was going on, the English speakers would go on with other conversations until finally we received the translated answer to the question we now barely remember. Thankfully the attendee from The Netherlands had no problems with English. Had there been another language involved that would have been tedious.
It was an interesting meeting. Perhaps the most valuable thing i learned, however, was that i should never voluntarily attend another Tech Pubs meeting again. It got a little boring after a while.
Posted by Matthew at July 17, 2005 10:21 PM