Life on the Shop Floor

YoYo,
Its been a month and a little more in my new role as a Manufacturing Engineer at a Medical Device Company. It has been so dynamic and so exciting so far that I have been left breathless by the pace of it all.
Life on the shop floor is so much different than what I had ever imagined. School certainly does not prepare you for it. While most assembly line operations in a big industry (e.g automobile) are automated, in a medical device firm that is often not the case. Which means that the quality of the product (and the bottom line) is literally dependent in the operators hands. This is a scary proposition. Consider if one of them has had a bad day and accidentally bends a wire. That's a scrap right there. Imagine this hapenning with one of them every single day. Profits can take such a big hit.
More than anything else it's about dealing with personalities. My floor has ~ 30 operators per shift, most of them females, age group ranging from 30 -55 ish coming from mostly South and Central American countries. Learning to communicate with them is an experience in itself and soon I think I will be forced to learn Spanish.
Some of them look as if they are born to work on the floor. Skilled hands,sharp eyes and quick grasping. Other's look like this is the last place they want to be with bored expressions written on their faces. Integrating this group into one solid team is a task to get the required numbers and yields, getting them to proactively follow and understand procedures-now that is some task.
Scraps and yields, throughputs and earned hours, efficiencies and tact times,ovens and coaters,spare parts and technicians ,operators and engineers engineering and man management-That is my life !!