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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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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings 0 • Tags: Apple, iPhone Assembly, Manufacturing in China

Apr 8 2017

Wacky Lean House | Bob Emiliani

 

“This year is the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI). There will surely be a big celebration. But in my view, there is less to celebrate than meets the eye. Here’s why:

LEI has controlled the progressive management agenda for the last 20 years. That means they own the failures as well as the successes. By LEIs own reckoning (as well as its sister organization, the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K.), success has been much less than they had hoped for.”

Sourced through Bob Emiliani’s blog

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Overall, I agree with Bob’s assessment, but I think American manufacturers deserve more of the blame than the LEI, for faddishly latching on to one tool after another and mistaking it for a panacea. For example, in his introduction to “Learning to See,” Mike Rother explicitly warns the reader that, at Toyota, Materials and Information Flow Analysis (MIFA) is not a major tool. Yes, he repackaged it with the attractive but nonsensical name of “Value Stream Mapping” (VSM), but his audience didn’t have to elevate it to the status that it did.

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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings 1 • Tags: Lean, LEI, Toyota, TPS, VSM

Apr 2 2017

The Boeing 787 Development Story

Employees cheering 1st 787/10 in 2/2017

Today, the Boeing 787 is a successful product, with production rates at 12 units/month, and a total of 521 flying just over 5 years from launch. By comparison, in 49 years of production, Boeing built 1,528 units of the 747. And, having just flown in a 787 from San Francisco to Paris and back, I can attest that it was for me less tiring than in any other plane, which I attribute to the higher air pressure. It is close to that of Lake Tahoe (6225′) while other planes are closer to Squaw Valley High Camp (8200′).

Back in 2008-2011, however, the news coverage of the 787 was not so positive, as the plane’s product launch accumulated a delay of more than three years, with analysts pondering what had gone wrong. To keep this event in perspective, we should remember that multiyear delays in product launches have recently been the rule rather than the exception in commercial aircraft, worldwide. In Europe, the Airbus A380 was 2 years late and, in Russia, so was the regional Superjet 100. But the question remained of how Boeing, an organization with 100 years of experience in designing and building airplanes, could not have done better.

I would like to present here a few explanations that have been proposed, without passing judgment as to whether any or all of them are accurate.

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By Michel Baudin • Management 2 • Tags: 787, Airbus, Boeing, Commercial aircraft, Dreamliner, Global Supply Chain, Product development

Mar 22 2017

Saturation In Manufacturing Versus Service

In Capacity Planning For 1st Responders, we considered the problem of dimensioning a group so that there is at least one member available when needed. Not all service groups, however, are expected to respond immediately to all customers. Most, from supermarket check stands and airport check-in counters to clinics for non-emergency health care, allow some amount of queueing, giving rise to the question of how long the queues become when the servers get busy.

Patients waiting in Emergency Room

At one point in his latest book, Andy and Me And The Hospital, Pascal Dennis writes that the average number of patients in an emergency room is inversely proportional to the availability of the doctors. The busier the doctors are, the more dramatic the effect. For example, if they go from being busy 98% of the time to 99%, their availability drop by half from 2% to 1%, and the mean number of patients doubles. Conversely, any improvement in emergency room procedures that, to provide the same service, reduces the doctors’ utilization from 99% to 98%, which cuts the mean number of patients —  and their mean waiting time — in half.

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By Michel Baudin • Laws of nature 0 • Tags: Airport Check-in, Hospitals, Queueing theory, Service, Supermarkets

Mar 12 2017

Meeting with Christoph Roser in Paris

With Christoph Roser

Christoph Roser, who blogs at AllAboutLean.com, is another on-line correspondent whom I had a chance to meet on this trip. We discussed our backgrounds and shared interests over a brasserie lunch in Paris, across from the Luxembourg gardens, where we walked afterward, among Parisians enjoying the early spring, playing tennis, and watching puppet shows. At one edge of the gardens is the seat of the French Senate; at the opposite, my alma mater, Mines-Paristech.

Brasserie Le Luxembourg

As authors, Christoph and I have been working with the same publisher, Taylor & Francis, and even with the same editor. His “Faster, Better, Cheaper” in the History of Manufacturing came out last year, covering the period “from the stone age to Lean Manufacturing and beyond,” which is very ambitious. I confessed to not having read it cover to cover, but the parts I did read seemed carefully researched. Unfortunately, the way things are made hasn’t been as thoroughly documented as wars and revolutions, and it’s a challenge to trace back the origins of ideas in this area that we apply every day.

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By Michel Baudin • News 1 • Tags: Christoph Roser, History of technology

Mar 11 2017

Lecture On Global Supply Chains At ETH Zürich on 3/8

Torbjørn Netland, professor of Operations Management at ETH Zürich,  blogger at Better Operations, and an on-line correspondent of many years, had invited me to deliver a guest lecture in his course on Global Operations Strategy.

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By Michel Baudin • News 1 • Tags: ETH, Global Supply Chain, Operations Management, Torbjørn Netland

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