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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The 11 handbooks on my shelves

Dec 27 2019

Get Rid of Your Print Handbooks!

Among the dusty tomes Dan Markovitz accused me of hoarding in my office, I found eleven handbooks. They occupy two linear feet of shelf space, and I have a few more in electronic form. The print books have indeed been accumulating dust because they are no longer where I look for information.

For theories, the first stop is Wikipedia; for details on using a software tool, StackOverflow; for changing headlight bulbs in my car, YouTube… The last time I opened a handbook was to check a claim that it covered a particular topic. It didn’t.

Continue reading…

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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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PLC picture

Dec 8 2019

We Should Pay More Attention to PLCs

Until this year, I didn’t pay much attention to Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). During Christoph Roser’s van full of nerds tour of Industry 4.0 in Germany last July, I heard about PLCs everywhere and even visited the Siemens plant in Amberg that produces 31% of the world’s PLCs. It was a wake-up call.

Continue reading…

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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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