News

Feb 5 2020

A 1975 Technology Forecast | M. E. Marchant | AFIPS Proceedings

“A recent Delphi-type forecast of the future of manufacturing carried out by the International Institution for Production Engineering Research (CIRP) resulted in 94 forecast events on which good consensus was obtained. Of these, 24, or over one-fourth, strongly indicated that the computer-integrated automatic factory would be a full-blown reality well before the end of this century. The three key events which summarize this aspect of that forecast are as follows:

  1. By 1980 (median), a computer software system for full automation and optimization of all steps in the manufacturing of a part will be developed and in wide use.
  2. By 1985 (median), full on-line automation and optimization of complete manufacturing plants, controlled by a central computer, will be a reality.
  3. By 1990 (median), more than 50 percent of the machine tools produced will not have a “stand-alone” use, but will be part of a versatile manufacturing system, featuring automatic part handling between stations, and being controlled from a central process computer.”

Source: ACM Digital Library

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks to Torbjørn Netland for digging up this gem, which puts the current claims about Industry 4.0 in perspective.

A Delphi-type forecast is based on questionnaires sent to a panel of experts in multiple rounds. Each expert sees the aggregate results of the previous round and modifies answers to arrive at a consensus. In other words, it’s subjective group-think.

1974 Personal Computer
1974 Altair-8800 computer

Like most of science-fiction, these forecasts both overestimate technology and fail to anticipate its evolution. A “central computer ” was going to do everything.  The paper is from 1975, a year after the first personal computer came out, the Altair 8800. At that time, PLCs and minicomputers like DEC’s PDP-11s were already taking over industrial control functions from mainframes.

The author worked for a machine-tool company, Cincinnati-Milacron, and seems to equate manufacturing with metalworking. Machine tools, today, are primarily used in automotive and aerospace; it is only a fraction of manufacturing as a whole.

#automation, #CIM, #industry4.0, #technologyforecast

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Jan 13 2020

New Year Lost and Found | John Shook | Planet Lean

“As many of us are wont to do, I reflected a bit over the holidays. As always, it wasn’t hard to find ample fodder on both sides of the hope vs despair ledger: we have so much cause for concern around us, but also plenty to rejoice about. […] This year’s reflection confirms what I’ve found over many years: when seeming to lose something of great value, if you look you can find that something new has come along to offer welcome and perhaps unexpected value.[…]

As a noteworthy attempt to shed light on the lean and digital muddle, I turn to Christoph Roser’s Industry 4.0 Discovery Bus Tour of Geeks. Christoph rented a bus and invited interested parties to join in a tour to try to figure out exactly what is all this noise about Industry 4.0. The Geeks visited 10 German factories that claim to be doing exemplary work, with Christoph blogging about the visits along the way. I encourage you to read the entire series of posts on his blog All About Lean.”

Source: Planet Lean

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

It’s wonderful to see LEI Chair John Shook recognize Christoph’s tour of Industry 4.0 as a highlight of 2019. The tour takes up half of his picture gallery. In his description, he got the essence right but a few details wrong. It wasn’t a “Bus Tour of Geeks” but a “Van Full of Nerds.”

It was a van because there were only 8 of us, and “nerds” at my insistence. Geeks are wannabee nerds and “nerds” was a more accurate description of Ralph Richter, Franck Vermet, Torbjørn Netland, Christoph Roser, Hironori Hibino, Kai Lorentzen, Mark Warren, and me.

We also visited 7 factories, not 10: Bosch (2 sites), ABB, Kärcher, Siemens, Trumpf, and Audi. In addition, we visited R&D labs, startups, and universities. Altogether, it was the most informative and densely packed tour I have ever been on or organized.

I agree with John Shook that Christoph’s posts about the tour are must-reads, as he covered every visit we made. I blogged about this trip in a complementary way, about tools and ideas that intrigued me rather than companies:

#lean, #lei, #planetlean, #allaboutlean, #johnshook, #industry40, #vanfullofnerds

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Jan 6 2020

Kei Abe, unsung Japanese genius | Hansjörg Wyss | Swiss Made

Hanjörg Wyss

Swiss Made is a 2013 book by James Breiding and Gerhard Schwarz about the successes of Swiss companies. It came to my attention for a paragraph that celebrates the contributions of my mentor Kei Abe as a consultant to Synthes and its charismatic CEO Hansjörg Wyss. As I was with Kei Abe on several occasions at Synthes and witnessed his interactions with Wyss and with engineers, I can attest that the following quote from the book is true:

“Hansjörg Wyss consolidated and expanded the Swiss orthopedic industry, becoming in the process one of Switzerland’s most successful and wealthy entrepreneurs. Wyss’s career is a tale of conquering the US market and then managing to consolidate the Swiss orthopedic industry, gobbling up one competitor after another — while effectively remaining the controlling shareholder. […] In 2011, Wyss sold Synthes to Johnson & Johnson for $21.3B.

The unsung Japanese genius

[…]The unsung hero of the company was Kei Abe, […] who managed to come up with novel designs for three decades. According to Wyss, Abe helped Synthes by ‘constantly forcing change in manufacturing, bringing new ideas and concepts for machines, thus enabling us to be at the forefront of new technology and having the best margins in the device industry.’

Of the overall strategy, Wyss remarks that ‘competitors thought we were crazy, but this is what kept the company one step ahead and gave us 10% higher margins'”

The book’s authors are journalists and had embellished the story with untrue statements that I edited out. No, Kei Abe was not a professor and never claimed to have “established the Kanban system” at Toyota. He was an aeronautics engineer from Tokyo University who went to work as a motorcycle designer for Honda, later joined the JMA and started his own consulting group, Management & Technology Japan in 1984, where I joined him in 1987.

On my last visit to Synthes, in Switzerland and without Kei, I remember pointing to a machine in a cell and telling my host “This looks like Kei’s handy work.”  He confirmed that it had indeed been based on his input.

#synthes, #keiabe, #hansjoergwyss, #leanmanufacturing

 

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Dec 25 2019

Your Lean Six Sigma Belt Program Is the Problem | Dan Markovitz | Industry Week

“I visited a company a few weeks ago that asks all of their employees to do a green belt project. It’s not mandatory, but completion of a project is part of their annual review. Not surprisingly, the management boasts that nearly everyone does a project. You know how many people do a second project? Less than 5%. This company is doing okay, but they definitely don’t have a culture of continuous improvement.”

Source: Industry Week

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Dan’s article is spot on, except in his assessment of statistical tools. Depending on the company’s situation, none of the ones he lists may be needed. Other tools, like SMED, cell design, mistake-proofing or JKK may be more relevant. Data science is needed in semiconductors and pharmaceuticals but the statistical tools Dan describes as “advanced” are not. ANOVA, regression, and t-tests go back 100 years; Design Of Experiments (DOE), a good 50. As for Ishikawa’s “7 tools of QC” from the 1960s,  I have never seen them used as advertised anywhere. They are sorely in need of an update in every respect, from data acquisition to analysis and presentation.

#leansixsigma, #blackbelts, #datascience,#7toolsofqc

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Nov 17 2019

The Inner Workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers | Christoph Roser | AllAboutLean

“Recently I had the chance to visit two Amazon Fulfillment Centers to take an in-depth look at their inner workings. While many articles about Amazon go over the basics, I will give you a deep dive into the workings of their fulfillment centers. Due to the amount of information, I divided the content across a series of posts. ”

 

Sourced through AllAboutLean: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks to Christoph for posting this valuable information. At the end of Part 4, he announces more to come, about the software running the fulfillment centers. I look forward to it.

#logistics, #amazon, #robots, #materialshandling

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Nov 4 2019

Phase Two Charts and Their Probability Limits | Don Wheeler | Quality Digest

“The ability to react to process changes is more important than protecting yourself from occasional false alarms. […] So do not worry so much about straining out the gnats of false alarms that you end up swallowing the camels of undetected process changes.”

Sourced through Quality Digest

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The people of the Honda plant in Anna, OH, claim to make the best engines in the world. On the floor, there is neither a single control chart nor any engineer trained in SPC.

Of course, we should fact-check their claim. Rankings of engine quality are not readily googleable. The closest I could find is a ranking of engine reliability from 2014 in a UK blog called The Car Expert, based on data from Warranty Direct, a UK provider of extended warranties. According to them, Honda indeed made the most reliable engines:

“Only one in every 344 Honda owners have had engine trouble, with second-placed rival Toyota notching up just 1 in 171.”

According to Anna engineers, their machine tools can hold tolerance ten times tighter than necessary. The few quality problems they do have are due to operators picking the wrong parts in assembly. Control charts in the machine shop would produce nothing but false alarms. With the charts crying wolf, the alarms would lose credibility and nobody would react when a real one hit.

In this kind of situation, Wheeler’s statement can be reversed. The ability to protect yourself against false alarms that send your engineers on wild goose chases is more important than detecting changes that hardly ever happen. You do want to detect changes in the process but control charts are too crude a tool for this purpose.

#SPC, #ControlChart

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