For one of my projects at Flowserve, my team decided we needed to go to a plant in Memphis, TN. After building a business case behind our decision to go to memphis and getting buy-in from the plant manager and IT director, we were on our way to the Memphis Pump Facility. Because we bought the plane tickets last minute, the tickets directly to Memphis were almost $900 dollars. We found a cheaper flight ($230) to Little Rock, then rented a vehicle and drove to Memphis -- which is just across the border.

They are working on a lot of cool projects that I sadly cannot tell you all about. But it was exciting just to see all the innovation that is going on within the company right now. Even our team project required some innovation. We were supposed to be there looking at barcoding technologies as a possible way to streamline processes and improve efficiency, but our focus shifted to a whole new type of project.

We had the GM of the plant recommend areas that he felt barcoding could improve the bottom line and increase efficiency, but then realized there were more serious issues at hand. We compiled a list of these inefficiencies and locked ourselves in a conference room and came up with some great ideas.

The whole 2006 IT Intern team took a trip to Sulphur Springs at the beginning of the summer, but this was a whole different kind of trip. We were no longer restriced to following the "safe path" that was outlined in yellow for visitors. We got our steel toed shoes and safety goggles on and we were given hands on time with the whole facility.

The first day included a completely guided tour with an agenda for meeting with various people throughout the day. We started with a general tour of the whole facility with one person giving us a very high-level explanation of what the issues at hand were. Throughout the rest of the day we met with subject matter experts within each area that needed improvement. All-in-All it was a good trip and I we should really be able to make a big impact within the company.