Teamwork makes the Dream work- Thalia G.

The Mother’s Milk Bank at Austin, Texas helps thousands of babies in central Texas by providing breast milk for them because of conditions they might have; being preterm babies, suffering allergies, having formula intolerance, or having infectious diseases. But now it is Team Flo’s turn to help the Mother’s Milk Bank by providing them a more efficient plan on how to process breast milk faster at their new facility.

Recently Team Flo (Patricia A., Isabella V., Celeste G., and Thalia G.) has been having trouble understanding the problem and creating a solution these past few weeks. But thanks to a recent visit to the Mothers Milk Bank on February 27th, we got to have an inside look at the problem. The visit to the Mother’s Milk Bank current facility we got to experience the limited working space the workers had and see how they had a shortage of  supplies causing the milk process to go slower. Many of the workers were bumping into each other, freezers filled up to their maximum capacity and not having more flasks to open up more space in the freezers.

How will we help? The visit helped us settle on the solution of creating a detailed floor plan of the labs in the new facility, arranging everything from shelves to the various machines used to process the milk. Though we are creating a floor plan, we also came up with the idea of creating a 3D floor plan because it will be easier for us to visualize and move around smaller models of the machines to see where they go best.

The new facility is more spacious so the non-profit company( Mother’s Milk Bank) will have more room for all the machines and enough room for the workers to not bump into each other. Our floor plan that we will create will guide them to know where to place everything for their milk process to go faster.

The Mother’s Milk Bank and Team Flo’s goal is for the milk production to be more efficient or in other words faster. The new floor plan given to us by Kim Updergrove has the labs next to each other according to the process the milk goes through; Donation, clean
technique, Pouring, Nutritional Analysis, Bottling, Pasteurizing, Bacteriological Cultures, and Freezing.  The order of the labs is easy and fast for the milk to travel in between the processes, increasing the speed of the process in an efficient way just how both our teams want. Once the Mother’s Milk Bank puts our solution into action they are hoping that the milk distribution will increase by at least 18%.

Overall, this project so far has been fun and very educational. We have learned a lot about breast milk and its qualities. As in how many ways it can help babies and many statistics about it. Even though, my team and I went through a rough patch at the beginning we are still excited to see where all of our hard work from both our teacher and Kim Updergrove will leads us.