May 11 2017

Not statistically significant does NOT mean insignificant | Rebecca A. Morgan | AME Target

“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?”

Sourced through AME Target

Michel Baudin‘s comments: I am sure many have had similar experiences to Becky’s with customer service in many companies. They tell you their product is used by millions and it’s the first time anyone reports this problem. You are probably using it wrong, or misreading its output,… This being said, it’s not really related to the concept of statistical significance.

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May 5 2017

Is Lean a set of tools – or a set of principles? | Pascal Dennis

Pascal Dennis

“Is Lean a set of tools – or a set of principles? If the latter, we’ll fall far short of our potential”

 

Sourced through LinkedIn

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Because of the way the meaning of Lean has changed over the past 25 years, I think it’s too late to ask this question. On the other hand, it is relevant about TPS or about the art of designing and improving manufacturing operations, whatever shorter name you want to give it.

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Apr 28 2017

7 questions to help you reduce project durations | Christian Hohmann

Christian Hohmann

“[…]Organizations dealing repeatedly with projects will soon develop templates of Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) holding the most current tasks and milestones. These canvasses speed up somewhat the project initiation and ensure some degree of standardization.

Over time though, the copy-pasting from one project to the next, the addition of “improvements” and requirements as well as countermeasures to problems kind of inflate the templates and the projects. This, in turn, extends the project’s duration as every additional task not only adds its allocated time to completion, but also the safety margin(s) the doer and/or project manager will add on top.[…]”

Sourced through Chris Hohmann

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The project management literature astonishingly fails to provide guidance on the art of breaking a project down into tasks. The “Body of Knowledge” tells you what a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) should look like but not how you actually break a project down into meaningful pieces, whether it is a dinner party, the construction of a bridge, or a moon shot. For a manager who has to make a plan, this makes templates irresistible: instead of thinking, you just fill in the blanks.

Chris’s questions are certainly relevant but I would like to go further and propose a few rules for generating a WBS.

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Apr 26 2017

New Chart Junk: Squaring The Pie

The purpose of graphics for data visualization is communication, not decoration, which is often forgotten in publications as well as on company performance dashboards. A case in point is the chart on yesterday’s cover of the New York Times. It shows that solar energy currently accounts for more than twice as many jobs as coal. It also shows the numbers of jobs in different sectors and uses a color code to mark some as based on fossil fuels versus renewable and low-emission technologies. 

Until recently, most publications would have used a pie chart. Now, graphic artists have found a way to square the pie chart into yet another style that will most likely trickle down to slideware and office walls, in spite of a low data-to-ink ratio and the use of two-dimensional shapes to display one-dimensional data.

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Apr 24 2017

Flow Line Pacing | All About Lean | Christoph Roser

 

Christoph Roser’s pulse line animation

“There are three different options on how to time the production lines.[…] The “easiest” one is an unstructured approach. The processes are still arranged in sequence; however, there is no fixed signal when to start processing a part. The pulse line is also a flow line, but now all parts move at the same time. […] When all processes are done, all parts move to the next process simultaneously. […] Another common way to structure the timing of flow lines is the continuously moving line.”

Sourced through All About Lean

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Christoph’s two posts are great for their rifle-shot focus on the single issue of flow line pacing and for their effective use of animation to illustrate principles. It makes the differences clear in a way you couldn’t on paper.

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Apr 16 2017

An American Student In An iPhone Factory | Business Insider | Kif Leswing

 

“Imagine going to work at 7:30 every night and spending the next 12 hours, including meals and breaks, inside a factory where your only job is to insert a single screw into the back of a smartphone, repeating the task over and over and over again. During the day, you sleep in a shared dorm room, and in the evening, you wake up and start all over again.That’s the routine that Dejian Zeng experienced when he spent six weeks working at an iPhone factory near Shanghai, China, last summer. […]. Unlike many of those workers, Zeng did not need to do the job to earn a living. He’s a grad student at New York University, and he worked at the factory for his summer project.”

Sourced through Business Insider

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks to my colleague Kevin Hop for sending me this rare peek into the life of the people who assemble iPhones by hand in Chinese factories each employing tens of thousands of workers. We need to keep in mind that this is the perspective of Dejian Zeng, an American student who was there for 6 weeks, not someone who works there for a living, but it is still informative.

While his account wouldn’t make anyone want to embrace iPhone assembly as a career choice, it’s not a horror story. The work is dull and repetitive, and there is too much of it, but it’s not described as dirty or dangerous. I have seen worse in poorly ventilated paint shops and machine shops with slippery floors, and not only in China.

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