Feb 27 2020
Sam MacPherson started a discussion on LinkedIn about Toyota founder Sakichi Toyoda’s 5 Precepts. Sakichi Toyoda died in 1930 and, 5 years later, Kiichiro and Risaburo Toyoda pulled together 5 precepts that he had lived to share with Toyota employees. Sam thinks that these 5 precepts are the key to understanding culture, global business practices, and company Hoshins.
Feb 15 2020
“TQM and Six Sigma are management fads that obey similar laws to clothing fashions. There are fashion designers who create the trend, and multipliers who disseminate and popularize it. These primarily include business consultants, but also scientists, managers, non-fiction authors or journalists. And there is the customer base that hopes to benefit from going with the fashion without having to think about it or take responsibility.”
Source brand eins
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks to Ferdinand Grah for drawing my attention on LinkedIn to this interview of German management thinker Alfred Kieser. The article is in German. In it, Kieser paints a bleak picture of Six Sigma at GE and how former CEO Jack Welch leveraged it to his own benefit while wrecking the organization with rank-and-yank management. As for agility, he sees it as “just as content-free as the Balanced Scorecard.”
Feb 5 2020
“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:
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.
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
Jan 22 2020
Industrial Engineers most often cite Maynard’s and Salvendy’s handbooks, both last updated in 2001. The most recent English-language handbook I know of is Badiru’s, whose 2nd edition came out in 2013. NITech is the Nagoya Institute of Technology (名古屋工業大学). Since 2007 NITech has been running a 6-month Plant Manager Training School (工場長養成塾) program once a year, including lectures, plant visits, and projects. This program has a companion handbook last updated in 2015. It’s focused on plant managers rather than IE’s but I included it here because it represents a different approach. The most recent publication I checked out is the 2019 Industrial Engineering Body of Knowledge (IEBoK) from the IISE but it is only an outline, with a bibliography on each topic.
Jan 13 2020
“Human work engineering” is neither a major in any university nor a job title I have ever encountered. As a specialty, it would integrate content currently filed under Human Factors, Ergonomics, Safety, Human-Machine Interfaces, Usability Engineering, Mistake-Proofing, and Jidoka into a consistent approach to production and service delivery.
But wait! Isn’t it what Industrial Engineering (IE) was supposed to be?
Mar 10 2020
Critical Data Elements and Data Quality | Rupa Mahanti | QualityDigest
“Not everything that can be counted counts. We are currently living in the digital age and are drowning in an ocean of data. Organizations have a large number of data entities and data elements, and a large volume of data corresponding to the same, and they continue to amass more and more data with each passing day. With a large amount of data coming in, it’s important to know what is ‘quality’ data, and what isn’t.”
Source: QualityDigest
Michel Baudin‘s comments: It is refreshing to see an article in QualityDigest on current topics, as opposed to pre-World War II methods. I tried to address this topic myself early on in this blog, in A Management Perspective on Data Quality.
#dataquality
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 1 • Tags: data quality