Digital Process Mapping Intern
About The Business: VG&P is a London-based furniture design and manufacturing business specialising in contemporary furniture for workplace, hospitality and education environments. From our Workshop in Walthamstow and our Design and Sales office in Oval, we design and manufacture a broad range of products, including established furniture collections, configurable solutions and fully bespoke pieces developed to meet specific project requirements.
Overview: At VG&P we are focused on strengthening our internal systems, processes and ways of working while maintaining the craftsmanship, flexibility and design quality that define VG&P. This internship forms part of that development and will focus on helping us make better use of our existing systems, improve operational structure and identify practical opportunities for greater consistency and efficiency. The successful candidate will work closely with the directors and wider team, with the opportunity to see the impact of their work implemented within the business.
Desirable Skills: Essential Skills • A graduate, or a Master’s student who has completed their studies, in manufacturing, industrial, mechanical or systems engineering, operations or supply chain management, business analytics, or a related discipline. Penultimate- and final-year undergraduates who can commit to 37.5 hours a week for the full 12 weeks are also welcome to apply. • Confident working with data in Excel or Google Sheets – filtering, pivot tables and simple charts. • Able to document a process clearly using flowcharts, swimlane diagrams or similar. • Strong interpersonal skills and the confidence to interview experienced makers, machinists and directors, and to earn their trust. Much of what you need to know is not written down, it lives with the people on the shop floor. • Clear written and verbal communication, including the confidence to present to a leadership team. • Ability to learn quickly and use initiative to identify and resolve problems. • Able to establish and maintain good working relationships and rapport, and to work effectively in a team. • Strong time management skills, with the ability to prioritise and take ownership of deadlines. • Comfortable working on-site in an active manufacturing workshop five days a week. • The right to work in the UK for the full 12-week period. Preferred Skills • Exposure to an MRP, ERP or CRM system – Fulcrum, Pipedrive or equivalent. • Familiarity with lean or continuous improvement methods such as value stream mapping, root cause analysis or 5 Whys. • Experience building dashboards in Google Looker Studio, Power BI or similar (note that this project deliberately establishes reliable data before building dashboards). • Basic understanding of bills of materials and production scheduling. • An interest in design, furniture or craft manufacturing. You will receive a full workplace and health & safety induction. While the role involves spending time within our manufacturing environment to understand processes, you will not be expected to operate production machinery.
Job Description:
Your first project: VG&P quote an eight-week lead time. In practice, a job often waits one to two weeks at the start while drawings, specifications, costings or purchasing information are gathered – which leaves us roughly five weeks to actually make it. That delay can become a big constraint in our business.
Our Made Smarter digital roadmap identified changes that would unlock the most improvement: an improved digital “Production-Ready Gate” – a clear status confirming that drawings, bill of materials, materials, costing and manufacturing information are all complete before a job enters the production schedule.
Your first project would be to make this happen. You will find out how work really flows through the business, measure how much time we lose and why, design a standard that sales, design, operations, and manufacturing all agree on, and build and test it within the systems we already use – Fulcrum, Solidworks, Pipedrive, and Google Workspace.
Therefore the intern will take an active role in designing, building and testing the new Production-Ready Gate. Working across Sales, Design, Operations and Manufacturing, they will map the current workflow and identify where information is delayed, duplicated or missing. They will then help define the data and checks required for a job to become production-ready and translate these into a practical digital workflow using Fulcrum MRP, SolidWorks, Pipedrive CRM and Google Workspace. The intern will configure and test the new process using live jobs, gather feedback from users and refine it based on the results. They will also help establish simple measures for lead time, delays and production readiness so that we can quantify the impact.
Based on lessons learned from this project and subject to time available, you will work with key stakeholders to identify and address other operational bottlenecks, process and data challenges within the business, and help develop, configure and test practical digital tools and improvements using our existing systems.
Your key duties for this initial project will be to:
• Map our design-to-production workflow end to end, from confirmed order through design, approval, purchasing and scheduling, and validate it with the people who do the work.
• Analyse a sample of recently completed jobs to measure how long they wait before they can be scheduled, and identify what information was missing in each case.
• Identify and rank the bottlenecks and handover points that cause the most delay.
• Facilitate a short cross-functional workshop to agree the minimum information a job needs before it goes into the schedule.
• Design and configure the Production-Ready checklist within Fulcrum’s existing job statuses, including naming and revision conventions for drawings and bills of materials.
• Pilot the gate on live jobs, gather feedback from the people using it, and improve it.
• Build a simple weekly view comparing production-ready work against our available maker hours (around 140 per week).
• Write short, practical standard operating procedures for the design-to-production handover.
• Measure the before-and-after impact and present your findings to the leadership team.
• Produce a handover pack and recommendations, including what we should standardise before our planned SWOOD implementation.
Please note: this is a process, data and improvement role, not a design role. You will not be doing furniture design, CAD modelling or CNC programming.