May 21 2017
Driving Improvement Through Systems Thinking | Gregg Stocker
“[…] When starting an improvement effort, I usually ask about the minimum target the team is attempting to achieve. The answer is often something made up on the spot or a generalization, like as much as possible. Improvement efforts should generally be driven by the actual requirements of the business. For example, if a company determines that the time between a customer placing an order and receiving the product is too long, it should determine an improvement target based on what the business needs. If it currently takes 42 days and customers expect to receive the product in 22 days because of their needs or what competitors are offering, the minimum improvement needed is 20 days.[…]”
Sourced through Lessons in Lean
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
Gregg Stocker illustrates abstract principles with concrete examples, which makes his meaning clear and unambiguous. The above excerpt is meant to show the need for employees and managers to understand the consequences of local actions on the organization as a whole. As he points out in the rest of his post, it’s not always easy.
“My fully-loaded 2012 Audi A6 had an intermittent frustrating problem since the day I bought it. No diagnostic codes indicated a problem. Escalation to German engineering had me ready to move back to Lexus. Their response was ‘it must not really be happening. Our codes would indicate if it were.’ That obnoxious response was based on the assumption they had thought of every cause of failure in developing the diagnostic codes. FMEA is not 100% and never will be. Do you have customer data that you’re not actively using to improve your product Four years after I first reported the issue, Audi issued an urgent safety recall for the problem that I had been experiencing. Why the delay?”
May 29 2017
The Cobot Controversy | Christian Hohmann
‘The cobot controversy” is the title of a short article published by and on the Hannover Messe (“Hannover Fair”, the industry exhibition) website. […]This article proposes a “balanced” view about the impact of the collaborative robots (cobots) on the jobs in industry. It caught my interest because most often the articles on those subjects, i.e. robots and future of jobs are single-sided.
On the one hand promoters of the factory of the future, industry 4.0 and robotics only highlight the alleged benefits of the new technologies. On the other hand, prophets of doom predict nothing else than mass extinction of jobs.”
Sourced through Christian Hohmann’s blog
Michel Baudin‘s comments: This is the first of a series of posts on Christian’s blog about cobots, a term I hadn’t heard before that designates robots that collaborate with people. According to Wikipedia, the term was coined in 1996 by tow academics, J. Edward Colgate and Michael Peshkin, and has been used to designate commercial products since 2012. The concept, however, has existed independently of the term both in science-fiction and in real life.
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By Michel Baudin • Management 0 • Tags: aliens1986, cobot, Creative Destruction, Robot