Manufacturing Operations Management Talk

Are We Teaching Young Kids Lean Practices?

If we want Lean Manufacturing practices to become more common, we should start teaching them at an early age. What are we actually learning?

5S (Sorting, Straightening, Shining, Standardizing, and Sustaining). Kids do learn early how to keep their area clean, clean up their own mess and put things back in their proper place. My kids’ early grade classes had shelves carefully labeled to help students remember where things belonged and students had to return materials back to their place after completing a project. Excellent 5S practice.

Make to Order. We are definitely teaching kids this lesson. My kids will NOT do any studying or homework in advance even when they know what is due next week. They understand that there is no sense in having a buffer of homework inventory that could go to waste if the teacher decides to change plans, skip a chapter or do them out of order. I have to agree with Just-In-Time homework.  

 Visual Work Instructions. I feel that we are failing in this area. We hugely  depend on the teachers to demonstrate the proper way of doing things and we don’t necessarily provide good visual work instructions. Would the kids follow the instructions if they were provided? Perhaps if we started this habit young, we would read those instructions manual later in life.

Work Cells. We do not practice the concept of work cells or assembly lines in school. Each student usually does their own project from start to finish craftsman style. We see a few team projects in later grades but workload is hardly ever balanced. They might get to feel the efficiency of an assembly line at lunch, but many schools don’t have cafeteria style anymore.

Elimination of Time and Material Waste. We do pretty well in this area in early grades. Students spend the entire school day in one classroom including nap time. Materials are very efficiently used since they are in short supply in school these days. But in later grades we become more wasteful. Someone decided that it is more efficient to move hundreds of students with full backpacks from class to class rather than move a few teachers around. We could set better examples at school of avoiding wasteful movement of inventory, tools and work-in-progress. Instead we learn that standing in line for half of the lunch time is normal and an expected part of life.

Are kids learning enough Lean know-how? Could they? Perhaps we will have to practice more at home... perhaps a hamburger work cell tonight : )

 

Q&A with Peter Coffee on Social Apps - Adding Value or Disruptive?

This week I attended a presentation by Peter Coffee at a Salesforce.com partner event in California and had a chance to ask Peter a question. I have been a fan of Peter's writing for a long time so I was looking forward to his keynote speech. Peter did not disappoint. He made some interesting points contrasting the different approaches towards the "cloud" by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Force.com. Peter contrasted the idea of providing "services" in the cloud versus providing "platforms" in the cloud.

Are we just moving the same problems somewhere else? Is Force.com really doing something different? Interesting food for thought but I honed in on something Peter said toward the end of his presentation. He wrapped up with three recommendations: (1) Don't ride a Unicorn, (2) Don't feed a Minotaur, and (3) Don't be Antisocial. You might think the Unicorn and Minotaur would get my attention, but his third point got most of my interest.

Peter: New systems should be social. They should initiate conversation based on what you are doing. They are not just waiting for you to ask them what to do.

Peter wrapped up his presentation, but this thought resonated in my head. Should an application start conversations? I like to get alerts when I have a task due, but do I want my software suggestions new tasks? Sounds interesting, but I'm not all convinced. So during the Q&A session I had to ask this question:

Conrad: At the office, we have all experienced the neighbor that tries to peek over the wall and start a conversation when we are really focused in the middle of a task. How does a social app balance between starting social conversations based on what I am doing and becoming a pest with unwanted obtrusive interruptions?

Peter: Good question. We are very concerned about creating apps that improve productivity. We have found that many users find the new paradigm less intrusive than paradigms like email. In social apps you usually subscribe to content you are interested in with actions like pressing the "Like" button on interesting content. In the email paradigm you are pushed content that you did not ask for. We have seen email go down as much as 40% in organizations that have shifted the way they distribute content internally.

Peter gave a few more examples, but I was not completely convinced.

Do you agree with Peter or do you also share my concern? Do we want our applications starting conversations? Or is this just a new type of virtual solicitor at my virtual door?

 

Why should we NOT go Paperless?

I have spent a lot of time trying to talk people into going paperless on the shop floor, but perhaps they are on to something. They are wearing me down and I’m starting to believe that perhaps going paperless is overrated. Let’s spend some time analyzing this choice and see if I can talk myself out of going paperless.
 
There is something to be said for leaving “good enough” alone—we minimize risk!

Risk is not a good thing. We teach project managers about assessing and mitigating risk. We have formal methods of analyzing risk like Failure Mode Analysis and I have a feeling that changing the way we do business is a risky business indeed.

We have done business like this for years. Why change now? We better have a really good reason. The current systems have their problems, but at least we know the problems. A new paperless process could create new problems. Who knows what kind of new problems? How can we know what we don’t know? But we do know that it will be different and different is not necessarily better. Could be better, but could be worse… right? I guess it depends on how bad things are now. But how bad could they be. After all, we have been doing it this way for years.

If we change our processes, we will have to change all our procedure books and we will have to train everyone. It took me ten years, but I was finally getting the hang of our current processes. You want me to learn it all again? Our shop floor people are used to the current way and I am not sure they can learn new ways. Do we want to risk it? They might file a bunch of complaints.

What do those manufacturing “engineers” know anyway? They want me to read THEIR work instructions, but I keep my own notes in my locker. I have been doing this job for years and I know all the little tricks to putting this assembly together. Check this out… I have all my notes written in the margins of this old drawing. They want me to forget my notes and use their recommendations, but they hardly come down here to see how we put it all together.

The few things we do today on these old computers take forever. I don’t see how asking us to do more on the computer is going to make things faster. Do you want me manufacturing? Or typing on the computer? The paper doesn’t make me wait. If I make a mistake, I can just throw the form away and start over. Or I can strike over what I wrote, initial it, and do it again.

We do lose some paper documents once in a while or something gets damaged, but it rarely happens. Nobody ever really goes back and checks the paper. Except for that one audit a year ago. That auditor was so frustrated going through all the paper that he probably does not want to come back : ) If we make it easier to audit historical records, we might get audited more often.

What if the computers go down? It happens, right? Are we going to print paper “just in case”? If we do, what is the point? What are we saving?

We have an amazing IT guy. He can do whatever we need using spreadsheets. We have different spreadsheets for different things. Different managers like to do their numbers differently and we often have to adjust the numbers we get from the shop floor. Some days are better than others, but we don’t want people panicking over a bad day. As long as the average for the week is okay—it’s all good.

I am not sticking my neck out on this new project. What if it fails? I am not sure my manager is fully behind this idea either. After all, he was instrumental in putting the current processes in place.

Even if we want to do this project, everyone is so busy. Who is going to work on this project? You know what happens to people on special projects when we need to reduce the workforce.

Where is the money going to come from? Perhaps we should be buying new machines instead. We are all going to be replaced by robots someday soon, so why bother trying to make us more productive?

They are looking at a commercial off-the-shelf software solution. I don’t know why when our IT guy can probably write a program specific to our needs in one or two weeks. He might be able to do it working during his lunch breaks. Why should we spend the money on a commercial product? 

What if the project works? I could get stuck assigned to doing this type of project all over again at another site. That would mean a lot of travel and I don’t like to travel.

What do you say? Do you really want to change the way you are doing business? Or do you agree we should leave “good enough” alone? Is there any risk in the “do-nothing” choice?