Factory Visit @ Proton, Tg Malim

It has been a wonderful day when I was given a chance to visit Proton factory located in Tg Malim,Perak. Although the trip was organized for Mechanical student in advance, but as a student from CCSE, I should be thankful for given a chance to join. Along the side, there was another two of my fellow friends who were going together, they were WWX and Nizam, the person incharge of the program.

Before going to factory visit, a brief seminar was conducted in a hall and a set of lunch was prepared. The seminar was informative and it provided a slight background of car manufacturing details and history of Proton. A slide of broadcast amused me whereby the first person who owned Proton Saga was a chinese. His feeling of being first person to have the national made car and impression towards it were advertised in the screen. Furthermore, former prime minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir praised for his patriotism because he booked the car several months before the official launch.

In the factory, the manufacturing was divided in to four stages, which were stamping, body assembling, painting, and trimming & final. Stamping was the process where components of the car was built, such as door, bonnet, roof, body structure, and etc. Then, the next operation was body assembly. I was told that nearly all the works were automated by robots and only rarely of man power was needed. Looking at those robots and huge machines, i was so enlightened by the advance techonologies used to produce a local car. The job of technician is not easy, besides inspections, they have to stand by in case emergency happens unexpectedly such as the failure of robots. If this happens, then the manufacturing engineers have to solve the problem asap to avoid the production schedule to mess up. Possibly, they have the mission impossible to overcome the problem within the same line when it occured. If they were to drag it to another production line, it will certainly be a woe to the factory. So, their responsibility and reliability must be relatively consistent to minimize the trouble that might lead to disaster.

Astonishingly, four different types of car model which were Gen2, Persona, Savvy and Satria Neo shared the only path in the factory. This showed a high efficiency of the work where robots and machines were able to sense them seperately to weld and assemble car accordingly. In every working hour, they have to produce 33 cars to satisfy the demand of the market. If they fails to achieve the target, OT is unavioded. Due to certain factors that could result the quality of car painting and safety of the visitor, we were not brought to painting site.

When we reached the trim and final section, i saw many close to completion car around. Workers were busy assembling engines, car lamps, seats, accessories and etc. while some were busy testing and inspecting the car to avoid defection. At one glance, there was a few special edition of Persona but in Lotus logo, they were called EuroStar. They were left-handed and only available in overseas.

Throughout the factory visit, my mind was broadened further, the experience i gained is valuable. I wish Proton is able to find a proper partnership which can promote them internationally to exploit global market so as to be less dependent on government.

My next trip is MAHA 2008, on thursday and I will have another two visits in next week.
Please stay tune.

p/s : Photo is not allowed to be taken during the site visit, but i have only several group photograph taken, only post it upon request.

Cheers,
Candle