Management – CA Work Experience Program

Day 3 at Apex Tool Group

My third morning at Apex Tool Group centered around the other side of their business. Project management (shudders). These are scary words for the engineer in my heart, and rightfully so. Project managers have the delicate challenge of balancing the technical and pecuniary aspects of a tool-making operation.

I worked with Donna today, a project manager for various tool development teams, such as cutting and wrenches. She explained three important factors to balance in a business like ATG’s: Cost, Schedule, and Quality. While it is often easy to accomplish two of these goals, attaining all three is ideal, and she seems to manage it! Donna’s role as a project manager seems very wide reaching because she has to communicate with so many different groups: industrial design, engineering, marketing, the list goes on. She told me how she often communicated with manufacturers to identify defects in prototyped tools, or with industrial design to assist the texturing and coloring process. In balancing the three factors of a project-cost, schedule, and quality-she reached out to the various design groups to expedite their processes any way she could.

After discussing project management with Donna, Leonora and I had lunch in the courtyard, as usual.

My afternoon was spent with Zack, a packaging engineer at ATG. He showed the complicated process of designing packaging for tools in CAD. I wasn’t previously aware that packaging was such a large portion of manufacturing. However, he explained that it isn’t just designing boxes for tools, but also coordinating the production of the packaging, communicating with graphic designers about their goals for a product, and even testing packaging for strength and protection. I learned a lot about packaging today!

Zack then took me to the distribution center, the second half of the ATG facility here in Apex. It was massive! I took some photos, but I’m sure that they can’t properly convey the scale of the building. There were multiple sections, such as delivery bays and sorting conveyors; it was like an Amazon warehouse. To truly convey the scope of the facility, let me leave you with this: that warehouse on Lufkin road is the distribution center for all of North America. That means any Crescent, Lufkin, Weller, Wiss, etc. product you buy will have come through the warehouse at some point in its life.

My day at Apex Tool Group was once again amazing! Thank you to Donna and Zack for making it so informative and fun.

Last day!

Today, we wrapped up our work experience program by meeting with Mr. Smith again to go over our findings. We met him at Carolina Cafe at 9:30 and presented him with our project results over the past couple of days. We showed him our i️information and explained to him the patterns and what surprised us about the data we collected. Mr Smith said that the i️nformation we collected would be very helpful for him going forward as well! After presenting him with our i️nformation, he explained to us how in recent years there is a notable increase in athletes coming out of North Carolina, something that was also very apparent in our data. This was very interesting to hear about as it’s something that i️ didn’t know about before. Also, we did another question and answer process which was very helpful in learning more about the sports agency process. I learned that being a sports agent is a lot more than just the money, and so much of it comes from the relationships you make with people. Mr. Smith was very helpful in answering Jonathan and Is questions about sports in general and also more about sports agents and what jobs they actually do. He stated the pros and cons of his job and stated that he liked his job 80 percent of the time, but there are cons just like there are cons of everything. The particular cons of this job come from people who fall apart while becoming a professional athlete. Altogether, i️t was a really good experience and i️m glad we had the opportunity to meet with him!

This is a picture of something that is stated on Vanguards website

Day 7!

Today was a day to work on the project that Mr. Smith assigned us yesterday. This project included two different parts, both of which to get us thinking more along the lines of sports management. We had time to work on this project alone, so Jonathan and I split up the work and then got started. The first step of what Mr. Smith assigned us to do had to do with general questions about the role of a sports agent. He asked us to pretend we were an athlete that was getting signed out of high school and to determine the factors and questions we would have for an agency through this process. This exercise gave us the opportunity to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes to gain more knowledge for the actual work that a sports agent does. It was interesting to do research about different sports agencies and read some of the main factors of why certain ones are more liked than others. This comes down to a lot of factors, some being truthfulness and honesty. The second part of the project had to do with athletes from North Carolina in the past multiple drafts for baseball, basketball, and football. We made a spreadsheet that consisted of the players from the first couple of rounds of these drafts and found their salary after 4 years and what amount of this salary would go to the agent. Mr. Smith told us that this information would be very useful to him and that it is something that he has always wanted to collect. We are very excited to meet with him again tomorrow and tell him about our findings!