Todo bien mae?
Hope everyone has been doing well. This past week was my third week working at MicroVention and I learned more about the document management process. I started this week by going to the clean room with my supervisor to finish taking pictures of unit defects. He had a list of different types of defects we needed to reproduce and take an image under the microscope so we could later add them to manufacturing procedures. This was pretty fun as I got to take scrap units and get creative to produce random defects and then take pictures of them under the microscope.
After finishing with all the pictures, I began working with the company’s online document management system to upload documents related to the transfer process of a product line from the USA to Costa Rica. In order to transfer a production line from one country to another, several validation tests need to be performed (and documented) to prove that the new site builds the same high-quality products as the previous one. Uploading and having these documents released in the database takes a lot longer than one might normally think. Document control has to create and assign you a number, you have to upload the files and have them approved and signed off by department representatives involved. If any representative rejects the document, it gets kicked back to rework with comments, and once modified gets resent to the representatives to approve and sign off until everyone is happy with it. As you can imagine, people take some time reviewing these documents and sometimes have to review it multiple times, so this process may take anywhere from a couple of days to a few weeks.
Besides learning about the documentation system, my supervisor Karthik also gave me an overview on the process validation standard operating procedure (SOP), covering topics such as installation qualification and operation qualification (IQ/OQ) for equipment, and process qualification (PQ) for manufacturing processes. This topic was very dense and a little confusing, so I tried to soak as much information as I could. Currently, the company is going through a validation process for a production line being transferred to Costa Rica, so the overview helped me understand the gist of how exactly this was being done.
After a long work week, my friends and I had a fun weekend trip to La Fortuna and Rio Celeste! This has been my most fun weekend yet in Costa Rica, going on a hike with hanging bridges, relaxing at hot springs, and finally going to a national park to see the Rio Celeste 🙂 We woke up early and left around 7 am on Saturday morning as the drive to La Fortuna was about 3.5 hours from our place. Once there, we dropped off our stuff at the Airbnb and headed straight to the hanging bridges. This was a lot of fun and we got to see some amazing views from the mountains!! Then we had lunch and went to Baldi Hot Springs, a cool resort with fancy hot springs. They had around 10 different pools, water slides, bars, and pretty fountains, so we had a lot of fun and relaxed there for the rest of the day. The next day we woke up early to go to the Tenorio Volcano National Park and went on a long hike to see the cool waterfall and beautiful light blue river. Afterwards, we ate lunch and finally headed back home which was about a 4-hour drive with traffic. I’ll leave the best pictures I took this weekend below for you to check out!
See you guys next week 😉