Evolving Excellence

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Boeing 777 in Four Minutes

We've picked on Boeing quite a bit over the last few years, all of it obviously deserved.  But it's time to be fair and balanced, and give the company some credit where credit is due.  The following is a YouTube video of a 777 being built, time-lapsed down to four minutes.  I think we can all agree that creating a product that large is really a marvel of manufacturing.  Sure there could be some improvements, but at the same time it's just slightly different than putting together a toaster... or even a car.  Enjoy!

Productivity: Eliminate Before You Optimize

I've long been a fan of Tim Ferriss and his best-selling book The Four Hour Work Week.  The book describes several methods to minimize and optimize life activities in order to create free time, although sometimes you have to deal with some ego-centric stories to get at the meat.  I've implemented some of his ideas to outsource small projects, refrain from checking email constantly, and live simply... and his concept works.  At least for me.

Today Tim had a fascinating post on his blog comparing his book with David Allen's Getting Things Done.  GTD has become wildly popular in corporate circles as it presumes to improve productivity through better organization, such as with emails.  Although Tim supports many concepts of the rival GTD system, he makes the following comment on GTD's overall philosophy:

Though David refers to desk-based inboxes, tickler files, etc. in certain parts of GTD, the broader concepts are frameworks for proper filtering of inputs (“open loops”) and definition of outputs (“next actions”), regardless of technologies used.

GTD is, however, a bottom-up approach to time management that — used in isolation — can lead to becoming very efficient (doing things well) but decreasingly effective (not doing the right things). Readers on this blog have suggested reading 4HWW [Four Hour Work Week] and 7 Habits prior to implementing GTD. The results and approaches are complementary rather than conflicting, but order is important.

He goes on to reiterate how the fundamental premise of The Four Hour Work Week is to reduce wasteful activities in order free up valuable time.  His final statement is what hit me:

Eliminate before you optimize.

The Four Hour Work Week eliminates wasteful activities.  Getting Things Done optimizes activities.  Sound familiar?

This is analogous to the conflict between lean manufacturing and six sigma.  Actually it's not a conflict; they are complementary philosophies just as Tim claims GTD is complementary to his 4HWW.  But the order of implementation is critical.

Six sigma does a phenomenal job of optimizing processes.  All processes.  If it is implemented prior to lean, there's a good chance that a lot of time will be spent optimizing... wasteful processes.  Which is why lean should be implemented prior to six sigma in order to identify and eliminate wasteful processes.  Then use six sigma to optimize what remains with lean providing oversight to ensure changes add value from the perspective of the customer.

Eliminate before you optimize.  On the factory floor and in your office.

Flying Composites

It looks like Boeing's penchant for supply chain convolutions is spreading down through their tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers. 

Hitco Carbon Composites announced on May 27, 2008 that it has signed a long term agreement with Alenia Aeronautica, S.p.A., a Finmeccanica Company, to supply the trailing edge components for the Boeing 787 horizontal stabilizer. Hitco will begin delivering flight hardware in the second quarter of 2008.  In addition, Alenia has selected Hitco to supply a range of other composite components for the B 787.

A little late in the game as several production lines around the world are already cranked up for the 787, but I could envision several rational reasons for the delay. 

So what's so interesting about this?  Think about the supply chain.  Hitco is located in southern California.  Alenia makes the horizontal stabilizer at its Grottaglie plant in Italy.  Then those components, along with other composite airframe sections, are transported to Boeing's Everett factory via the DreamLifter. 

Let's see... by my estimation that's about 12,500 miles from Los Angeles to Grottaglie to Everett.  And Los Angeles to Everett?  About 1,000 miles. 

Hmmm... I guess somehow that makes sense.  In someone's mind.

Is Invincible Invincible?

Perhaps it's all in the name, but you have to love a company with the cohones to call themselves Invincible.  Invincible Metal Solutions in this case.  They do seem to have some luck.

Invincible Metal Furniture Solutions, doing business as Invincible, opened its doors May 21, after Schenian purchased the assets of Invincible Office Furniture for $2.1 million, after the century-old company had gone into receivership.  Schenian’s buy-out has saved most of the 75 employees jobs at the Franklin Street manufacturing plant.

Furniture manufacturers in the U.S. have had some problems, but as we've mentioned before, they can succeed if they really work at it.  The old Invincible went into receivership, but that didn't stop them from trying to improve.

“Throughout the receivership process our performance has improved dramatically, as compared to the previous company," Nething stated.

The new company may be uniquely positioned because they held onto their most valuable asset...

“The highly trained workforce at Invincible has remained essentially intact, and are looking forward to the new era of manufacturing under the Invincible brand,” Diederichs stated.

And of course lean manufacturing will play a part.

Diederichs said Invincible would seek to expand its presence in underserved markets. “In addition, Invincible will be looking to strengthen its product offering while focusing on lean manufacturing initiatives, quality, and cutting edge product development,” Diederichs stated.

Here's hoping Invincible stays Invincible!

Dell Cookie Dough

A recent article in the Lake Forester, a small newspaper based north of Chicago, was surprisingly accurate with regards to certain core aspects of lean manufacturing.  I'd like to give credit to the author, however there was no by-line.

For 100 years, manufacturing companies adhered to this mass production philosophy. Factories made products in bigger and bigger lot sizes. Workers became more specialized as the manufacturing engineers worked to standardize products to reduce costs and improve manufacturability. Products that ranged from automobiles to pharmaceuticals were manufactured in long production runs and the output was distributed in sophisticated supply lines that were designed to reach the ultimate customer. The distribution systems needed large warehouses to store finished goods while they waited for the customers to buy them.

In spite of the investment in these large plants and warehouses, this philosophy of manufacturing products in large lots began to change in the last 30 years. Pioneers in global manufacturing methods challenged this standardized, assembly line approach.

The author then brings that concept home by... bringing it home.

On a personal level, this idea really hit home recently when my wife and I geared up to make a batch of our chocolate chip cookies for a neighborhood get-together. We assembled the ingredients needed to make all 10 dozen cookies in one giant batch. This included bags of chips, blocks of butter, and several big sacks of flour. Everything was carefully measured into our biggest steel mixing bowl as we manufactured a giant batch of cookie dough.

After the first cookie sheet came out of the oven, we realized something was wrong. The canister of salt got mixed up with the canister of sugar. When we taste tested our first cookie, we found that we had manufactured a huge batch of cookie dough that included three cups of iodized salt rather than three cups of granulated sugar. We had to start over when we recognized the error. As we dumped this big batch of cookie dough, my wife remarked, "Too bad we didn't make only enough dough for the first dozen. We would have caught the error sooner."

He (yes, we can now infer the author is a "he" unless they're in a handful of states) has just done a great job of explaining one of the most counter-intuitive aspects of lean manufacturing: why smaller and smaller lots are more efficient than large lots.  The hidden cost of risk.

The author then gets to his article's primary premise: that Dell is a great example of why small lots work.

Michael Dell built a company on this philosophy of small lot manufacturing. In the process, he taught a world-class manufacturing company like IBM, by example, how to build computers. The idea is simple enough. Instead of making 100,000 identical personal computers on an assembly line and storing them in inventory while they wait for customers, Dell decided to design a system which would make one computer at a time and only make that particular computer when a specific customer ordered it.

And further explains the benefits.

Building computers one at a time means that there is no costly inventory of finished computers waiting for customers in a warehouse somewhere.

Small lot manufacturing also means that quality problems are caught quickly, as it would have been in my salty cookie experience. In a more agile manufacturing system and there is a built in ability to improve the system and lower costs on the fly.

Essential elements of such well known systems as the Toyota Production Process, Six Sigma Manufacturing, Cellular Manufacturing, and Lean Manufacturing are based on small lot, build to order systems. The customers see better quality, lower costs, and more responsive tailored products that are available more quickly.

Ah, but alas.  Dell missed the one critical aspect of lean: respect for people.  Without the people side of lean, they could not evolve rapidly.  By not evolving, they eventually found themselves in an unfavorable cost position compared to their competitors.  Without understanding that second pillar of lean, their cost reduction efforts are focusing on closing plants and shedding people, and even outsourcing manufacturing.  Why is why last month we took Dell to task.

Let's dispel once and for all the hubris that "Dell practically invented lean manufacturing."  Nothing could be further from the truth... both in terms of what company invented lean and in Dell being lean to begin with.  But without the core competency of supply chain management (note I did not say "manufacturing") that Dell did excel at, what is Dell?

Indeed.  Which could explained why I now drive a Mac.

Thank You

We talk a lot about leadership and courage on this blog.  Today we're reminded that there's a whole other level of those traits.  Where leadership can change the course of history and where courage may mean you don't come home to your family.  Today we salute those that made our world possible.  Thank you.

Different Approaches to a Truck Slowdown

Truck sales are plummeting thanks to rising gas costs.  What are the major automakers doing about it?  First, let's recall our post last month on Nissan and Chrysler.

The column goes on to discuss how Chrysler will build large vehicles for Nissan and Nissan will supply or co-manufacture small vehicles for Chrysler.  This will help reduce the multiple architecture or platform problem that Mr. Phelan believes is critical to Chrysler's long term viability.

So if sales of large vehicles are decreasing, who got the better end of that deal?  If fuel costs continue to rise, will Chrysler be manufacturing... anything?

Now let's move on to Ford.

Ford Motor Co. will halt more pickup-truck and sport-utility vehicle production over the next two months, a sign that falling U.S. consumer demand for the vehicles still hasn't bottomed out.  The auto maker's Wayne, Mich., truck-assembly plant, home to the Expedition and Navigator SUVs, will be shut from June ...

Sounds prudent.  Painful, but prudent.  Better to reduce the top line than to keep on manufacturing products that aren't going to be purchased any time soon.

And then there's GM.  I guess you could say they're lucky... they have idle truck plants thanks to a strike, so they aren't incurring major shutdown costs like Ford while still drying up excess supply.  Or so you would think.

In a regulatory filing, GM said the 11-week strike at American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc. cut GM's truck production by 230,000 vehicles in the second quarter. GM estimated that drop would lower its pretax earnings by $1.8 billion, and warned it won't be able to make up that lost production later in the year because of slack truck demand.

Uhh... wait a minute.  If demand is slack, why would you want to make up production?  So the trucks can sit and tie up cash while depreciating and waiting for a fire sale?  Yep, that's a good strategy.

GM has more than a simple production demand problem.  They just don't realize what it is.

A Violinist in the Bronx

Last evening, on one of those rare occasions where I was forced to watch TV, I was flipping through the channels and came across CNBC's The Big Idea with Donney Deutsch.  I've seen snippets before, and although it can be slightly interesting, generally I just roll my eyes at the "big idea."

This episode did not appear to be an exception.  In the "Minutes to Millions" segment where people get to present a quick overview of their new product, some entrepreneuress was pushing a t-shirt designed for singles.  Each shirt had catchy phrases designed to supposedly start a conversation such as "Say Hello" and "Single."  Nothing like looking desperate, eh?  They might as well add one that says "I'm 39 and eventually want kids... after a walk on the beach at sunset."  Call me old-fashioned, I guess.

The kicker with the show is that these "big ideas" get judged by a panel including Mr. Deutsch, as well as other ubiquitous dignitaries such as an editor of Cosmo and someone that makes vodka.  Good luck with that the collective intellectual power of that lineup.  Which is probably why they unanimously thought selling a simple t-shirt screenprinted with some estrogen-scented phrase for $28 was a great idea.

I was laughing at the idiocy of it all until I realized that I was wearing a... $28 Life is Good t-shirt screenprinted with a silly happy face sitting on a kayak.  Hmmm....

So the next person up was Miri Ben-Ari, and this was a truly interesting segment.  A world-class violinist playing the most classical of classical instruments, therefore you'd expect her to be playing Brahms and Chopin. And you would be wrong.

Ms. Ben-Ari thinks outside of the box.  Way outside.  Where would be the least likely place to find a violinist?  How about playing hip-hop in the Bronx theatre.  In fact, she has just released an album called The Hip-Hop Violinist... and it even has explicit lyrics!

Truly remarkable, and thought-provoking.  Where can a skill or method be applied?  5S, kaizen, value stream mapping... and most of lean manufacturing for that matter... is being applied to all sorts of organizations and systems outside of manufacturing.  The same goes for basically any skill. 

Stretch the limits of your imagination.

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After over 10 years in existence and one year of paperwork submissions, Superfactory is now Superfactory®. 

Federal registration of trademarks involves the establishment of rights in a mark based on legitimate use of the mark. Although federal registration of trademarks is not required to use a trademark, owning a federal trademark registration has several advantages, including notice to the public of the registrant's claim of ownership of the mark, a legal presumption of ownership nationwide, the exclusive right to use the mark on or in connection with the goods or services set forth in the registration, the ability to bring an action concerning the mark in federal court, the use of the U.S. registration as a basis to obtain registration in foreign countries, and the ability to file the U.S. registration with the U.S. Customs Service to prevent importation of infringing foreign goods.

Yes, that word I took all of 10 seconds to dream up as a domain name for a simple set of lean manufacturing links, cheesy or catchy depending on your perspective, is now legally protected as a trademark.  And now I also must protect it by replacing the logos on various websites and products... that's a lot of work!