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.
Dec 12 2018
Open workspaces and collaboration | E. S. Bernstein and S. Turban | Royal Society
“[…]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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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings 0 • Tags: Cubicle, Office, Open Workspace