Mississippi Plans Manufacturing Management Center

Posted on June 30, 2008  Comments (0)

Ole Miss plans manufacturing center

Ole Miss plans to build a center to teach manufacturing management skills. Gov. Haley Barbour, Ole Miss officials and Toyota executives announced the $22 million Center for Manufacturing Excellence on Monday in Jackson. Construction of the 47,000- square-foot center could start this fall.

“We in Mississippi continue to have a larger percentage of our population employed in manufacturing than the country as a whole,” Barbour said. “One way to help our businesses innovate and stay successful is to give them world-class people to employ, whether it’s engineers or business majors or people who work on the line.”

By teaching principles of lean manufacturing, total quality management and just-in-time inventory delivery, the center will produce workers for many sectors including aerospace, electronics, technology and polymer sciences.
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The center’s funding comes from the state’s $323.9 million incentive package for Toyota. The automaker is building a $1.3 billion plant in Blue Springs, about 50 miles from Oxford. Toyota reset the opening of the plant from early 2010 to May 2010 for economic and model-changeover reasons.
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The center will offer four bachelor’s degree programs, two business-related and two engineering-related, all with a manufacturing emphasis. Barbour and Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat will appoint a board to create a curriculum and oversee the center.

“We have completed the building drawings and expect to be receiving bids shortly. I would hope that construction would begin this fall,” Khayat said.

He said he expects 20 to 40 students the first year, with enrollment increasing dramatically in the following years. Most of the initial students likely will switch their majors from engineering or business. The interdisciplinary program will include cooperatives and externships.

“We’re going to see an interesting marriage between engineering and business. We think it will be a model for the future of manufacturing,” Khayat said.

Related: Engineering Innovation for Manufacturing and the Economy – Manufacturing Employee Shortage in Utah – Global Manufacturing Data by Country (Feb 2006 post) – Trends in Manufacturing Jobs

Printer Product Development Using Design of Experiments

Posted on June 29, 2008  Comments (0)

MEMS development in less than half the time by Christopher N. Delametter, Eastman Kodak Company

The traditional approach to optimizing a product or process using computer simulation is to evaluate the effects of one design parameter at a time. The problem with this approach is that interactions between design factors and second-order effects are likely to result in a locally optimized design that will provide far less performance than the global optimum. Kodak researchers use DOE to develop tests that examine first-order, second-order, and multiple factor effects simultaneously with relatively few simulation runs. The result is that the analyst can iterate to a globally optimized design with a far higher level of certainty and in much less time than the traditional approach.
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By using DOE to drive CFD, Kodak researchers were able to optimize the design of the printhead in considerably less time than competitors. The advantages of simulation were especially apparent late in the project when researchers discovered a more optimal ink formulation for one of the colors.

Related: Design of Experiments articles – Using Design of Experiments – Statistics for Experimenters – Why Use Designed Factorial Experiments? – Kodak Debuts Printers With Inexpensive Cartridges

Google Knows it is a 2.0 World

Posted on June 27, 2008  Comments (1)

You can accomplish a great deal by just talking to people. Google Public Relations:

I did not really expect it, but the next day I got a call from Jeffrey Korn at Google California. He explained that he was the one responsible for building the Google Bookmarks and Google Web History tools. The problem with my extension was something I hadn’t imagined: a scaling problem. Hehe, Google had scaling problems :-) .

The gBrain extension creates a lot of bookmarks. Several thousands a month. And the Google bookmarks system was never made with this amount in mind. What made things worse (and I didn’t knew that), the bookmarks are connected to the normal web search. Whenever you use the web search, it checks it against your Google bookmarks. You can easily imagine what problems can come up when you have a several 10 or even 100 thousands of bookmarks…

Jeffery also made a few suggestions how the extension could be changed to make use of their Web history service instead of the bookmarks system. This would avoid the scaling problems. I may consider it some day.

But why am I telling this? Because I’m amazed how Google handled this. Instead of just blocking my extension at their side, or sending me a cease and desist letter they contacted me and asked.

Good for Google. I do find it a bit funny they had a lawyer contact the guy but still Google’s reaction was much better than most companies would be. Companies like Google, Amazon, Lego, New York Times are taking advantage of technology to leverage community efforts to improve the value of their service to customers. This is an important innovation management needs to acknowledge and manage. Or you can be like the poorly managed journal publishers or music industry that are destroying their organizations futures.

Related: Funding Google Gadget Development – Innovative Marketing Podcast (Lego) – Innovation at Google

Management Improvement Jobs

Posted on June 25, 2008  Comments (0)

Curious Cat Management Improvement Career Connections provides a source of jobs targeted to those interested in this blog. Take a look at the jobs listed now including: Lean Manager at Erlanger in Kentucky; Senior Lean Six Sigma Specialist at Cooper Crouse-Hinds in New York and CEO of Jefferson State Forest Products in California.

At the recent Deming Seminar in Colorado Springs I met the CEO of upstream21, which owns Jefferson State Forest Products: Bryan Redd. He has a great understanding of how to put Deming and lean manufacturing ideas into practice. Having a boss that is knowledgeable and passionate about the management improvement is a huge plus. I think this is a great opportunity.

So if you are interested in looking at new career opportunities look at the jobs posted on the job board and good luck. And if you have a management improvement opening, go ahead an add the opportunity.

Related: Signs You Have a Great Job, or Not – Deming Companies – Hiring the Right Employees

Management Blog Posts From June 2005

Posted on June 24, 2008  Comments (0)

Here are the blog posts from 3 years ago this month on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog: From Mechanistic to Social Systemic Thinking – Targets Distorting the System – Dilbert and Deming.

The Dilbert site has learned to take advantage of the web and allow embedding of the strips on blogs and web pages. Good for them, but you really would have thought they would have lead this trend not delayed so long.

The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success

Posted on June 23, 2008  Comments (0)

An interesting article in this month’s Harvard Business Review looks at the seeming contradictions at Toyota – The Contradictions That Drive Toyota’s Success by Hirotaka Takeuchi, Emi Osono, and Norihiko Shimizu

Many of Toyota’s goals are purposely vague, allowing employees to channel their energies in different directions and forcing specialists from different functions to collaborate across the rigid silos in which they usually work. For example, Watanabe has said that his goal is to build a car that makes the air cleaner, prevents accidents, makes people healthier and happier when they drive it, and gets you from coast to coast on one tank of gas… Zenji Yasuda, a former Toyota senior managing director, points out the wisdom of painting with broad strokes. “If he makes [the goal] more concrete, employees won’t be able to exercise their full potential. The vague nature of this goal confers freedom to researchers to open new avenues of exploration; procurement to look for new and unknown suppliers who possess needed technology; and sales to consider the next steps needed to sell such products.”

A good explanation of how Toyota avoids the trap of arbitrary numerical goals (Innovation at Toyota).

Toyota’s eagerness to experiment helps it clear the hurdles that stand in the way of achieving near-impossible goals. People test hypotheses and learn from the consequent successes and failures. By encouraging employees to experiment, Toyota moves out of its comfort zone and into uncharted territory.

This is another key point often overlooked. Experimentation is key to gaining knowledge and improving. And they have steadily improved their method of experimentation building on the PDSA/PDCA cycle:

Toyota organizes experiments using strict routines, as is widely known. It has refined Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA), the continuous-improvement process used throughout the business world, into the Toyota Business Practices (TBP) process. The eight-step TBP lays out a path for employees to challenge the status quo: clarify the problem; break down the problem; set a target; analyze the root cause; develop countermeasures; see countermeasures through; monitor both results and processes; and standardize successful processes. Similarly, the A3 report… forces employees to capture the most essential information needed to solve a problem on a single sheet that they can disseminate widely.

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Zipcar Innovation

Posted on June 21, 2008  Comments (2)

map of zip cars near the White House

Zipcar is an intriguing idea where you rent cars by the hour. The whole process is a significant change from the previous rental model (gas, parking and insurance included). Zipcar makes deals with local governments to secure zipcar parking near public transportation. They also have deals with universities, apartment buildings and businesses all of which provides a new level of easy customer access with cars available in many locations. The internet is used to schedule and provide up to date information. It is a great idea for those in cities where you can design your life so a car is rarely needed. But having access to a car in those times can be very convenient.

The images show zipcars available near the White House in Washington DC. The White House is in the middle of the bottom of the image (Lafayette Square is immediately north of the White House).

The rates are not cheap when you look at per hour costs. But when you look at replacing the need for a car the savings can be large (if you do not drive too much). And for those that doing without a car is not realistic zipcar can be used for any needs for a second car. It is still a pretty large change in mindset. To try and help people give the idea a try Zipcar is trying the Zipcar Low-Car Diet challenge.

You agree to keep your car keys in your junk drawer for just one month, from July 21st through August 15th. In return, you get a loaded public transit pass, a free 1-year Zipcar membership, some driving time and more goodies that we’ll tell you about a little later.

During the month, we’ll ask that you check in and let us know how your diet’s going. You can send us emails, even video clips, to share your thoughts and stories. We’ll post excerpts on our website to help keep everyone motivated!

Related: Traffic Congestion Non-Solution – Airfare Innovation Example – Urban Planning – Deming on Innovation Read more

Hustle and Flow

Posted on June 17, 2008  Comments (0)

There are actually examples of good management by airlines: CEO Flight Attendant – Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes. Here is another one: Hustle & Flow

Moving customers from frustration to relief–in a fraction of the time–has been at the root of Alaska Airlines’ Airport of the Future project. The carrier has spent more than a decade designing a better way to get customers through airport check-in, debuting the first iteration in its Anchorage terminal in 2004. Last October, the $3.3 billion carrier began rolling out its redesign in Seattle, where Alaska and its sister airline, Horizon, have almost 50% market share. The project, to be completed in May, has already reduced wait times and increased agent productivity. “People come to the airport expecting to stand in line,” says Ed White, Alaska’s VP of corporate real estate, who ran the project. “It’s an indictment of our industry.”

Alaska’s embrace of the future came out of necessity. By the mid-1990s, it was running out of space to handle its Seattle passengers. “If you came here on a busy day, it was jammed,” White says. A new terminal, though, would have cost around $500 million. Alaska tried self-serve kiosks, but technology alone wasn’t the answer. Kiosks were pushed against the ticket counter, which only further stagnated the flow of passengers.

White assembled a team of employees from across the company to design a better system. It visited theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see what it could learn. It found less confusion and shorter waits at places where employees were available to direct customers. “Disneyland is great at this,” says Jeff Anderson, a member of White’s skunk works. “They have their people in all the right places.”

Ok, it is a bit hard to understand the “spent more than a decade” line but still there are good ideas here. The article includes several examples of lean thinking, such as:
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Management Improvement Carnival #37

Posted on June 16, 2008  Comments (0)

Ron Pereira is hosting Management Improvement Carnival #37 on the LSS Academy blog, some of the highlights include:

  • Are we Cowboys or Not? by Mark Graban – “Anyway, I’m not trying to start a Liker v Bodek battle, but it’s an interesting contrast in perspectives.”
  • Numb3rs by Sue Kozlowski – “Now, part of the reason for this hyperbole is that exciting headlines get more people to buy the paper, and so you may think that the exaggeration is just a way to get people to read the accompanying story.”
  • Necessary but Insufficient by Pete Abilla – “Motorola (MOT), the inventor of Six Sigma, is in big trouble. Even though it invented Six Sigma, this is a clear example that shows how Lean or Six Sigma are not a cure-all for corporate woes…”
  • Eight Reasons Your Lean/Six Sigma Could Fail by Ron Pereira – “Programs, by definition, end. Conversely, the ancient origin of the word philosophy (philosophía) means ‘love of knowledge’ or ‘love of wisdom’. And true love, as the good book tells us, never ends.”

Photos of Forest Glen Preserve in Illinois

Posted on June 14, 2008  Comments (0)

Photos from my hike in Forest Glen Preserve, Illinois 2 years ago.

photo of purple flower

Other photos: Kentucky Travelogue – Metropolitan Museum of Art – North Cascades National Park
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Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines

Posted on June 12, 2008  Comments (0)

“You have to treat your employees like customers”

“We’ve never had layoffs,” he told me the day before the annual meeting, sitting on the couch of the single messiest executive office I’ve ever seen. “We could have made more money if we furloughed people. But we don’t do that. And we honor them constantly. Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions or grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine…”

“There isn’t any customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction,” said Gordon Bethune, the former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and an old friend of Mr. Kelleher’s. “He recognized that good employee relations would affect the bottom line. He knew that having employees who wanted to do a good job would drive revenue and lower costs.

Well said. Related: Focus on Customers and Employees – Airline Quality – Respect for People – Curious Cat Management Improvement Dictionary

Continual Improvement

Posted on June 10, 2008  Comments (10)

Dr. Deming used to using the term continual improvement (rather than continuous improvement) later in his life because that would include continuous and dis-continuous improvement (innovation, etc.). I use continual improvement for that reason also. I think the improvement process

  • must be never ending
  • must focus daily on how any process can be improved
  • must focus on adopting improvement systemically (not just locally, by one person or team)
  • must focus on discontinuous improvement which could include high energy kaizen events and dramatic innovation
  • must include a study phase (PDSA) where the improvements are evaluated to determine whether they actually had the anticipate effect
  • and must include improvement of the improvement process itself

To me, continual improvement encompasses both continuous and discontinuous improvement.

Reflecting on: Continuous Improvement vs. Continual Improvement

Related: Process Improvement and Innovation – Better and Different – Kaizen the Toyota Way – Change is not Improvement – Think Long Term Act Daily – Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone

Fairness Matters

Posted on June 9, 2008  Comments (1)

Sense of Fairness Affects Outlook, Decisions

Burnout has been long associated with being overworked and underpaid, but psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter found that these were not the crucial factors. The single biggest difference between employees who suffered burnout and those who did not was the whether they thought that they were being treated unfairly or fairly.
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Their research on fairness dovetails with work by other researchers showing that humans care a great deal about how they are being treated relative to others. In many ways, fairness seems to matter more than absolute measures of how well they are faring — people seem willing to endure tough times if they have the sense the burden is being shared equally, but they quickly become resentful if they feel they are being singled out for poor treatment.
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If the sum is $100, for example, the first person might offer to give away $25 and keep $75 for himself. If the second person agrees, the money is divided accordingly. But if the second person rejects the deal, neither one gets anything.

If people cared only about absolute rewards, then Person B ought to accept whatever Person A offers, because getting even $1 is better than nothing. But experiments show that many people will reject the deal if they feel the first person is dividing the money unfairly.

Related: Obscene CEO Pay – Respect for People and Understanding Psychology – Why Pay Taxes or be Honest – The Illusion of Understanding – The Psychology of Too Much Choice

Internships Increasing

Posted on June 8, 2008  Comments (2)

Hard to find a job, but not an internship

The bullish market for interns is good news for those in college, who find that internships are increasingly required for landing that first job. The summer posts allow students to bolster their resumes, learn more about their field of choice and meet executives who could hire them for full-time positions one day. And they often pay a good wage: on average, $16.33 an hour, or $7,850 over 12 weeks, Luckenbaugh said.

“Students are looking for internships even after their first year,” said Sheila Curran, executive director of Duke University’s career center, noting that 88% of Duke students graduate with at least one internship under their belts. “It’s become expected that you’d have at least one internship during college.”
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Universities are also recognizing the increased importance of internships and are working harder to secure spots for their students, said Richard Bottner, founder of Intern Bridge, a college recruiting research and consulting firm. Some colleges are even requiring students to do at least one internship to graduate.

graphic of Deming Scholars internship cycle
The Deming Scholars MBA program at Fordham includes a heavy dose of internships (“Subject matter is delivered in five integrated learning cycles. Five eight-week sessions of classroom lectures, seminars and study are linked by seven-week internships at participating firms”). Integrating well planned internships can be very valuable to improving learning. By the way if your company would like to host these students you can contact the program to discuss the opportunity.

Curiouscat.com has a web site for locating internships. I would love to get some good management improvement based internships added – there is no charge to add internships. For actual jobs try the Curious Cat Management Improvement job board.

Related: Hiring the Right Employees – IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure? – Young IT Workers Demands – Joel Management – The Joy of Work

Department of Defense Lean Six Sigma

Posted on June 5, 2008  Comments (0)

Gordon England, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, signed a directive establishing policy and assigning responsibilities to institutionalize the effort throughout DoD. See a webcast of his speech on lean six sigma to a DoD conference on continuous process improvement.

Leading Business Transformation the “Lean” Way

Since it began employing LSS, the Department of the Navy (DON) has completed 1,700 Black Belt/Green Belt projects and over 2,000 Kaizen events (i.e., action-oriented events designed to improve existing processes). Initial projects were designed to build confidence and gain momentum for success in high-impact core business value streams. The DON’s total of 3,399 trained LSS Green Belts exceeds the Secretary’s goal of 2,000 by the end of 2006, and of the 935 trained LSS Black Belts in the DON, 93 have attained American Society for Quality (ASQ) Black Belt certification.

Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) joined with Raytheon to complete an LSS project, which ultimately saved $133.5M across the 2006 FYDP and $421M over the life of the Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) Block II program. The integrated product team developed a three-tier approach to reducing weapon unit cost over a two-year period. Success of the JSOW program has led to development of a follow-on Block III weapon system.

The Marine Corps is applying LSS concepts, analytic techniques, and tools to improve the process for identifying, evaluating and acquiring critically needed warfighting equipment. Initial analysis focused on the evaluation stage, where improvements reduced the time required for this step by 35% – from 131 days to 85 days – and identified savings valued at $135K per year.

The first LSS initiative for Army aviation scheduled maintenance was deemed a success and signals a more efficient future for maintaining the Fort Rucker helicopter fleet. More than 32 days of scheduled maintenance were saved during the first LSS effort for Aviation Unit Maintenance involving UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter scheduled maintenance. The first helicopter inducted into the newly developed process was returned to flying status in just 18 days, which included a four-day break for the Fourth of July weekend. That is a 67% improvement in phase flow efficiency from the previous average time of more than 50 days of phase cycle maintenance for the UH-60.

See: online six sigma resources and lean manufacturing resources from the Curious Cat management improvement web site.

Related: Government Lean Six Sigma – Public Sector Continuous Improvement Site – Transformation Through Lean Six Sigma – Army Business Transformation – History Of Quality Management Online – More Lean Government – Army Lean Six Sigma
Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O’Neill, and Carol Wallen, June 1986.

Businesses Tell the IRS They Are Not American but Executives Stay in USA

Posted on June 4, 2008  Comments (3)

I have previously written about the ethically challenged companies that claim they are not American to avoid paying the taxes that they owe. For some reason the executives, often seem to stay in the USA though? It is sad that such behavior is tolerated.

10 Big Businesses That Have Moved Their Headquarters Abroad to Pay Less U.S. Taxes

Halliburton: Houston-based Halliburton, which offers a broad array of oil-field technologies and services to upstream oil and gas customers worldwide, announced the opening of a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai on March 12, 2007. The company, which was once led by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, said that its relocation was part of a strategy that it announced in mid-2006 to concentrate its efforts in the Middle East in order to attract business.

Yes the same company taking billions in Pentagon no-bid contracts (Company Official Defends No-Bid Army Contract – Halliburton Contract Critic Loses Her Job – Halliburton’s Fleecing Ends — Or Does It?).

And that isn’t all – read this on how they don’t pay social security or unemployment… taxes since they are not an American company when they hire American’s to work for the US government in Iraq. Top Iraq contractor skirts US taxes offshore – “Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.”
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Engineering Innovation

Posted on June 3, 2008  Comments (0)

In the webcast Dean Kamen discusses his latest innovation: robotic arms for people (amazing stuff). Once again he is doing great stuff. It is great what engineers can do (many worked together to get the progress so far) when given the opportunity. We need many more such efforts.

The research was funded by DARPA. DARPA, for those that don’t know, also made reading this blog possible. They funded the development of the internet. I was giving a talk, while I was working for the Office of Secretary of Defense Quality Management Office, on Using Quality to Develop an Internet Resource (back before blogs, but after the web, in 1999). I was trimming things as I spoke and cut the tidbit about DARPA and the internet because I figured everyone already knew that (and I had to trim as I was speaking). In discussions afterwards I found many didn’t know DARPA’s involvement.

Related: Better and Different – Water and Electricity for All – Google Innovation

Dean Kamen Lends a Hand, or Two (August 2007):
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Management Improvement Carnival #36

Posted on June 1, 2008  Comments (0)

Please submit your favorite management posts to the carnival. Read the previous management carnivals.

  • Adopting Agile Processes by Eric Engelmann – “So scrum is about fixing the system. If you don’t write code, it might not be apparent what’s different about this, so I’ll pull out what I love about it…”
  • Generosity comes with international shipping by Andy – “I am the CEO at Timbuk2…and I wanted to say – thank you for the posting. and tell you I am very proud of the team here.

    1. They made this call on their own.
    2. They broke the rules that should be broken

  • The gemba of poverty by Karen Wilhelm – “But the idea wasn’t to give these things to those in need. It was to keep designing and trying until you had something that could be manufactured at a profit to meet a price point poor people could afford.”
  • Fire Fighting vs. Root Cause Problem Solving by Mark Graban – “The workaround does nothing to prevent the problem from occurring again — this ensures more wasted time and more potential problems in the future.”
  • Coffee cup kanban by Corey Ladas – “the cup is the kanban. The cup-ban doubles as an order form that can encode most combinations that a barista should expect.”
  • Teams and Improvement by John Dowd – “The lesson is that being aware of the existence of interactions and being attentive to their implications is a part of team management.”
  • Conference Calls, Kids, and SMED by Ron Pereira – “Why wait until the machine is stopped to get all the tools and supplies needed? Collect all the tools while the machine is running so you don’t waste time once the machine has stopped.”

    • Read more

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