Jan 14 2019

SpaceX Laying Off 10% of Workforce | Bloomberg

SpaceX capsule

“[…]’To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based Internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company,’ SpaceX said in a statement Friday.”

Source: IndustryWeek

Michel Baudin‘s comments: So that’s what “Lean” has come to mean? Laying off people makes you “leaner.” When you see this kind of statement, you understand how “Lean implementation” can make employees worry. I have heard managers brag about being Lean by having one first-line manager for 100 shop floor operators. Never mind that that ratio, at Toyota, is more like 1 first-line manager for 17 operators.

#lean, #layoff, #spacex, #toyota

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Dec 23 2018

Kaizen and Improvements That Last

One reader recently asked the Gemba Coach “Our teams have good results with kaizen, but nothing seems to stick for long – any advice?” This begs the question of what you call “good results that don’t stick.” Successfully completing a Kaizen project means reducing a new work method to daily practice. A compelling demo in a management presentation is not the end. Claiming good results on this basis is like declaring victory after running a quarter of the race. By definition, if it doesn’t stick, it’s not a good result! If it happens systematically, then your whole Kaizen activity is a failure. 

Continue reading…

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Dec 12 2018

Open workspaces and collaboration | E. S. Bernstein and S. Turban | Royal Society

Data capture device

“[…]In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined—using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers—the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.[…]”

Michel Baudin‘s comments: I got curious after reading multiple blanket statements on LinkedIn to the effect that open workspaces decrease office productivity. The authors all refer to the same “Harvard study” without giving any details.  Is the Harvard label sufficient to quell any doubts? As the notorious Reinhart-Rogoff paper on austerity shows, it is nothing of the kind. 

On closer scrutiny, the Bernstein-Turban’s study is serious but limited in scope. The readers of readers of readers of their paper draw increasingly cosmic conclusions that the study does not support. To locate it, you must thread your way through multiple layers of papers. Each one simplifies and amplifies the results of the previous ones. In the process, they forget any of the nuances and restrictions of the original authors. 

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Nov 30 2018

Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers among Components

In assembly operations, we need a Plan For Every Part (PFEP). For each purchased component, we must specify suppliers, choose order and delivery patterns, organize all actions taken inside the plant to deliver it from the receiving dock to the assembly line.

Setting a plan for each one of the thousands of purchased items is a daunting task. It helps if you can group the items in a handful of categories. Policies by category may not be as fine-tuned as for individual items but they are an improvement over “one-size-fits-all.”

To make it easiest to do what you do the most frequently, a natural criterion for categorizing purchased components is frequency of use. Once you have sorted the purchased components by decreasing frequency of use, however, you need to set category boundaries that make sense for assembly.

Rather than using arbitrary cut-offs, we base thresholds on the proportion of the demand that can be built completely as a function of the frequency rank of components. A point on this plot means, for example, that 50% of the demand can be met using only the 100 most frequently used components.

We explain how we use this chart to categorize components as Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers. Then we show how we generate it from bills of materials and a product demand. We end with actual examples from several factories and recommendations on communicating these results.

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Nov 17 2018

Manufacturing Today, By The Numbers

[latexpage]

What does manufacturing as a whole look like as a worldwide economic activity? When a company starts up or shuts down a plant, or relocates production from one country to another, it is a data point. It may be a compelling story but it doesn’t tell you the aggregate effect of all manufacturing on a country or the world.

Beyond anecdotes about particular companies or locations, the global data collected by the World Bank and the International Labor Organization confirm that (1) the size of the manufacturing sector is positively correlated with that of the rest of the economy, and (2) the share of manufacturing in advanced economies is holding its own in terms of value added but declining in terms of share of the labor force.

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Nov 7 2018

Where Problem-Solving Goes Wrong | Gregg Stocker | Lessons in Lean

“[…] Whenever someone asks for input on a problem-solving A3, I tend to look for the red flags or areas in each section where help is most commonly needed. The key is to help people understand that the process is about investigating, reflecting, and learning, not filling in the form. It is far too common, especially early in a person’s development, to force-fit information into the boxes just to appease someone else and show that the process was followed. […]”

Sourced through Lessons in Lean

Michel Baudin‘s comments:  Companies use forms to make teams answer every question. Filling out forms, however, often degenerates into the formalism Gregg describes. Instead of reviewing content, managers just check that the team has entered something in every box.

Gregg also says nothing about immediate countermeasures to “stop the bleeding.” Assume, for example, that customers start returning defectives. The first step is to prevent more defectives from escaping. Meanwhile, you investigate root causes, implement permanent solutions, and validate them. The point of the process is to go beyond immediate countermeasures and dismantle them once they are no longer useful.

#problemsolving, #A3

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