Mar 5 2023
The literature on Quality does not dwell on its interactions with other components of a manufacturing system, like Production, Engineering, Production Control/Logistics, or Supply Chains. As a consequence, it is missing out on key relationships that affect the value of quality improvement.
Feb 26 2023
What ChatGPT says about me is generally flattering but inaccurate and inconsistent. Ask multiple times and you get different wrong answers. I find it disturbing that it credits me for things I didn’t do. It also omits some I have done, which makes me wonder to whom ChatGPT attributes them. Here are a few mistakes I found in four successive versions:
In other words, #ChatGPT is looser with facts than any journalist I have ever read.
Dec 22 2022
As co-author of Introduction to Manufacturing, I received the first print copies with trepidation::
For the paperback edition, so far, it’s yes on all counts. Here is a sample of a page spread:
The only elements I found missing are three endorsements of Introduction to Manufacturing that we greatly appreciate:
We hope to see them in the next print run.
#introductiontomanufacturing, #manufacturing
Dec 17 2022
Several sites on the Van of Nerds tour in France in 9/22 maintain skills matrices on the shop floor. It means that the value of the skills matrix is widely known. Several questions must be answered to make it effective:
Dec 11 2022
In a personal exchange, François Pellerin described our Introduction to Manufacturing as a “reference book,” which makes it sound like one of those thick tomes you put on a shelf and never open: a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or a handbook.
This is 180º from our intention. We wrote it as a textbook for students of industrial engineering and operations management that working professionals can also use.
We hope to see it on desks, dog-eared, highlighted, annotated, and coffee-stained. If not in print, then in the same condition in the reader’s e-book library.
Mar 31 2023
Using videos to improve operations | Part 9 – Updates
It’s been 110 years since Frank Gilbreth first used film cameras to improve processes, 36 years since Kei Abe taught me how to do it with VHS, and six years since my last post about videos. Yet the number of manufacturing companies leveraging this tool remains minuscule. The technical hurdles are long gone, but the human ones are still in place. Managers must make it a priority to make the work easier for operators, and operators need to trust management not to use videos against them. My 2nd post on this subject was about management preparation. It’s doable, if not easy.
This post focuses on the easy part: technical issues. This is not to ignore the hard stuff but to address a few recent challenges. Smartphone cameras, by default, now generate high-definition video files so large that they impede analysis. It is, therefore, a good idea to work with lower resolutions. The software to help with time studies based on video has evolved too, and I am including introductions to a few currently available packages. Readers are invited to share their experiences with these or other tools.
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By Michel Baudin • Tools • 1 • Tags: Manufacturing, Process analysis, Video analysis