A Summer Internship Experience in Philip Morris International

Introduction

I made my internship at Philip Morris International for 20 days. During my internship, I worked in the production department. As an intern, my duty was working on a project that focuses on the optimization of the operator’s workload in the Filter Factory. PMI started to implement an integrated operating system, OPEN+, to all its affiliates, and the factory where I made my internship, PhilSA, is one of the leading companies in this implementation. There are many tools in OPEN+ and all these tools need some time my project was aiming for the answer to the following question; is it possible to apply all these tools for operators, during my summer internship experience I tried to find an answer to this question. I can break my internship into three phases; the first phase is the learning phase, in this phase, I tried to learn a working system of PhilSA and OPEN+. The second phase is collecting information; this information is numerical data and verbal information from operators. The third and final phase is making optimization of the system and running a simulation of it. I am going to describe all these phases in the following parts of my internship report.

Tools that I used during my internship were MS Excel, MS Project, and Arena Simulation. Also, there were some internal tools for PMI like SPA (Secondary Performance Application), LES (Logistics Execution System), and MES (Manufacturing Execution System). During my internship, MS Excel was the main tool that I used especially in the data collecting part. MS Project and Arena Simulation were important tools for the optimization part besides mathematical calculations I used MS Project for the optimized workload of the operators. After calculations, I used Arena Simulation to simulate the optimized system before doing an on-field simulation. The internal tools of PMI were new tools for me and on the first days of my internship, I try to learn all these internal tools because there were necessary for my project. Especially, SPA had a crucial role while I study on machines’ past trends on performance-related KPIs.

During my internship, I used all the optimization techniques -linear, non-linear, and integer- that I learned in university. Also, I had a chance to learn a well-developed integrated operating system, OPEN+. In the following parts of my internship report, I am going to explain all these tools and techniques in detail. Also, I am going to explain my project in detail with its outcomes.

Internship Company Description

Philip Morris International was founded by Philip Morris in London, England in 1847. In 1881, Leopard Morris established Philip Morris & Company and Grunebaum Ltd. with Joseph Grunebaum. In 1885, the company changed its name to Philip Morris & Co. Ltd. In 1902, the company moved to New York. In 1987, Philip Morris International (PMI) was incorporated in New York, USA, and then transferred its operation center to Lausanne, Switzerland in 2001. In 2003, Philip Morris Companies Inc. formally changed its name to Altria Group, and in 2008 Philip Morris International was spun off from Altria.

Philip Morris International is a leading international tobacco company, with 77,000 employees around the World. The company has 46 production facilities worldwide and their products are sold in over 180 markets. The company owns six of the top 15 international brands in the world and the flagship brand of PMI is Marlboro. Marlboro has been the world’s number-one international cigarette brand since 1972; the brand is one of the best-known trademarks among all consumer products.

Other brands of Philip Morris International sold internationally are Parliament, Virginia S., L&M, Lark, Merit, Muratti, Philip Morris, Bond Street, Chesterfield, Next, Red &White. The company also owns some local cigarette brands; Dji Sam Soe, Sampoerna A, and Sampoerna U in Indonesia; Fortune and Jackpot in the Philippines; Belmont and Canadian Classics in Canada and Delicados in Mexico.

Philip Morris International also has smoke-free products and wants to replace all its products with smoke-free products in the future. PMI’s smoke-free product portfolio contains four products in various stages of development. First of these products is IQOS, a heated tobacco system, available on the market. The key point of IQOS is that tobacco in cigarettes burns at 600°C and this temperature causes smoke that contains high levels of harmful chemicals. But IQOS heats tobacco to 350°C without combustion, ash, smoke, or fire, and because there is no burned tobacco the levels of harmful chemicals are reduced compared to cigarette smoke. The other smoke-free products are TEEPS, MESH, and STEEM; these products are still in the developing stage and not available in markets.

Philip Morris International’s Turkey affiliate in Turkey divides into two companies; PMSA and PhilSA. PhilSA was established in 1991 with a 75/25 manufacturing joint venture between Philip Morris International and Sabancı Holding. The factory in Izmir was established in 1991 and today with over 1,200 employees, the factory produces 250 different cigarette products for the internal market and for export markets. PhilSA is the biggest cigarette factory in the world with its manufacturing capacity. PMSA was established in 1994 with a 75/25 joint between Philip Morris International and Sabancı Holding. The company is responsible for the national distribution and sales operations of Philip Morris cigarette brands. The company has one of the biggest sales networks in Turkey with around 1,900 people. PMSA’s distribution network serves over 140,000 sales points in 81 cities throughout Turkey.

During my internship, I worked in Filter Factory which is a sub-branch of the Production Department. PhilSA has 5 different factories in its site; Primary, Filter, Mid-Speed, Seal, and High-Speed. The operations carried out in these factories are the following; in Primary, tobacco leaves processed for making cigarettes; in Filter, production of filters in the cigarettes; in Mid-Speed, High-Speed, and Seal production and packing process of the cigarettes. Mid-Speed and High-Speed are the factories that carry out the same process with different speed machines. Seal Factory produces cigarettes and packs them in sealed packages.

My department, Filter Factory, was established in 1992 with the factory but it is included in the cigarette-making factories. In 2017, Filter Factory left cigarette-making factories and established a factory on the same site.

Optimization of Operator’s Workload in Filter Factory

Problem Statement

In 2008, Philip Morris International decided to change its integrated operation system to a new one called, OPEN+. This system was created by one of the biggest FMCG companies in the world, P&G, and PMI adapted P&G’s system to its own system. The company chose some of its affiliates as pilot affiliates for OPEN+ implementation. PhilSA was one of the pilot affiliates and they started to implement OPEN+. Implementation breaks down into five phases. In Phase 0, a model machine in every factory need to meet phase passing criteria. At the beginning of my project, the model machine in Filter Factory made some progress on Phase 0, that’s why I worked on other machines. The machines that I worked on belong to Cell3 in Filter Factory, machines are the following; FI03, FI04, FI05, FI06, FI15, and FI16. In total, I worked on six machines but there were only two types of machines; four of the machines were the same, and two of the machines were the same.

In my project, I faced two major problems. The first major problem that I faced was that PMI operators have some daily jobs while operating their machines and these daily jobs take some amount of time. With the implementation of OPEN+, several tools need to be added to their daily jobs. All these daily jobs take many times on a daily basis going alongside operating machines. This implementation process needs to be carefully planned and all daily jobs need to align on their priority. The second major problem that I faced was the operators’ behaviors and capacities. Every operator has a different capability to understand new tools that came with OPEN+ and this problem needs to take into consideration while making an implementation plan.

To understand the major problems that I faced during my project, I am going to explain these two problems in detail. As I said before, the first major problem that I faced was that PMI operators have some daily jobs while operating their machines and these daily jobs take some amount of time. In Filter Factor at PhilSA, there are four teams whose work in three shifts, and every shift lasts for eight hours. In these eight hours, there is 50 minutes lunch break and there two 15-minute coffee breaks; in other words, every shift has 400 minutes of working time. During 400 minutes, they work on minor fixing on machines for 108 minutes and work on long-stop fixing on machines for 45 minutes. While the machine is working, they need to change plug wraps 50 times in a shift and this operation takes 0.5 minutes; also, they need to change the raw material called, tow, for 1 time in a shift, and this operation takes 10 minutes. Finally, they need to make pitstops to clean the machine in every shift and this operation takes 30 minutes. All of these daily jobs take 218 minutes and there is an excess of 182 minutes in a shift but these 182 minutes spread in shifts respected to machine stops. With the implementation of OPEN+, several tools that I will explain in the future, need to be added to operators’ daily jobs.

The second major problem that I faced was the operators’ behaviors and capacities. Human psychology rejects the new routines at first and a system change that happens in PMI contains many new routines and operators are the ones who got the most effect on them. As I said before, OPEN+ contains several tools which need to be done by the operators, but they are not willing to get used to these new tools because of the time limitation. Also, every operator has a different capacity to understand and execute all of these new tools; there needs to be an implementation plan for each operator designed for every individual.

Tools Used During My Internship

The main tools that I used for my project as an intern were MS Excel, MS Project, Arena Simulation, and PMI’s internal tools; SPA, LES, and MES. Also, I used some optimization techniques which were very useful for my solution; these optimization techniques were linear programming, non-linear programming, and integer programming.

MS Excel is the most used software in the world which can be used for calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and macro programming. Almost all companies use MS Excel for their work, the underlying cause of it is, the software is one of the most user-friendly software for its features. Like most companies, Philip Morris International uses MS Excel in all departments.

MS Project is software that can be useful while developing a schedule, analyzing workloads, tracking progress, and assigning resources to tasks. During my project, MS Project was the most used software by me; because my project’s main idea was analyzing the operator’s workload and optimizing them. During analyzing the operator’s workload process I used MS Project with its several features.

Arena Simulation is discrete event simulation software acquired by Rockwell Automation. The software uses the SIMAN processor and simulation language. PhilSA has a huge amount of production levels daily and it is hard to stop a machine for a real-life simulation every time, that’s why, I used Arena Simulation during my project to lower the amount of real-life simulations and I made them when I was sure about my calculations on a trial on Arena Simulation. I added some additional knowledge to my knowledge that I get from the lesson IE325.

PMI’s internal tools; SPA, LES, and MES helped me a lot during my project because machines performance-related data and process orders for the logistics and manufacturing done by these internal tools. SPA (Secondary Performance Application) showed me the all data about all machines that I worked on. LES (Logistics Execution System) showed me internal logistics orders and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) showed me process orders for every machine’s production.

Linear programming is a mathematical method to achieve the optimal outcome in a mathematical model whose requirements are represented by linear relationships. The technique is useful for optimizing linear objective functions, subject to linear equity and linear inequality constraints. Nonlinear programming is a mathematical method to achieve optimal outcomes in a mathematical model like linear programming but with a nonlinear relationship. Integer programming is a mathematical method to achieve the optimal outcome in a mathematical model like linear and nonlinear programming but with integer variables. During my project, I used these techniques with different frequencies. I added some additional knowledge to my knowledge that I get from the following lessons; IE201, IE301, and IE342.          

Works Cited

1. PMI.com. 'About Us.' Philip Morris International, www.pmi.com/about-us.