All Not Parts of Your System Can Become Lean

Conventional organizations lead to sub optimization. But lean manufacturing as a system hates this. What is the meaning of word sub optimization in lean manufacturing context? Let me explain to you.

Conventional organizations are created around functional and departmentalized thinking. Similar functions are centralized and that entity is known as a department. Examples for departments are production, accounts and human resources. In a conventional management individual departments operate in their own. Each department has it’s own set of targets to achieve. Performance of that particular department is measured against these key performance indicators or KPIs. For an example production department will work to achieve it’s target in efficiency while human resource department will work on keeping to it’s KPI in achieving low labor turnovers. Let’s say every department achieved their own individual targets. Still will this organization e effective. In the general case it is not.

One of the main problems any conventional organization face is their inability to focus on customer. The reason is simple. It is sub optimization. Your customer won’t mind how efficient your production facility is. Customers will only see your products. They want to get good quality products for lower prices and with shorter lead times. They might also consider about the environmental impacts and other social compliance standards when they buy products. How are you going to produce something valuable for your customer with a system which is fully focused on it’s own operations.

Lean treats sub optimization as an enemy due to it’s incapability to stand up to the customers requirement. Organization is a single entity from the customer point of view. Then the total organization must be focused on delivering value to the customer. Parts of that organization called departments can not deliver this value to the customer.

One of the biggest mistakes many organizations make in their lean efforts is thinking of making their individual departments lean. It is true that any efforts should have a starting point. Lean implementation is not an exception. But if your starting point itself is wrong then your system will be a failure for sure. Before thinking about implementing lean manufacturing in your organization get use to customer focused thinking. Start to think how you as an organization can deliver value to your customer. Lean efforts should start at least within your full organization not in parts of it.

Manage Quality through Both Quality Control and Quality Assurance Techniques

Managing quality on your project means that you must first understand the specific quality expectations of your customer and then put a proactive plan in place to meet those expectations. The "proactive plan" contains a number of elements,  the most important of which are the quality control and quality assurance activities that need to be performed.

Quality control and quality assurance are important concepts, yet most project managers have only a vague understanding of the meanings and the differences between these terms. It's actually pretty easy.

Quality Control refers to quality related activities  associated with the creation of project deliverables. Quality control is used to verify that deliverables are of acceptable quality and that they are complete and correct. Examples of quality control activities include deliverable peer reviews and the testing process.

Quality Assurance refers to the process used to create the deliverables, and can be performed by a manager, client, or even a third-party reviewer. Examples of quality assurance include process checklists and project audits. If your project gets audited, for instance, an auditor might not be able to tell if the content of a specific deliverable is acceptable. However, the auditor should be able to tell if the deliverable seems acceptable based on the process used to create it (quality assurance). That's why project auditors can perform a quality assurance review on your project, even if they do not know the specifics of what you are delivering. They don't know your project, but they know what good processes look like.

Here's an example to drive home the point. Let's say a project manager asked the sponsor to approve the Business Requirements Report.If you were the sponsor, how would you validate that the business requirements seemed complete and correct?

One solution would be for you to actually review the document and the business requirements. If you did that, you would be performing a quality control activity, since your actions would be based on validating the deliverable itself.

However, let's say the document was thirty pages long and that you (as the sponsor) did not have the expertise, the time, or the inclination to do a specific content review. In that case, you wouldn't ask toreview the document itself. Instead, you would ask the project manager to describe the process used to create the document. Let's say you received the following reply.

Project manager - "I gathered eight of your major users in afacilitated session. After the meeting, I documented the requirements and asked the group for their feedback, modifications, etc. I then took these updated requirements to representatives from the Legal, Finance, Manufacturing and Purchasing groups and they added requirements that were needed to support company standards. We then had a meeting with the four managers in your area that are most impacted by this system. These managers added a few more requirements. I then asked your four managers to sign off on the requirements and you can see their signatures on the last page."

If you were the sponsor, would you now feel comfortable to sign the requirements? If it were me, I would feel pretty comfortable.

That's the difference. Quality control activities are focused on the deliverable itself. Quality assurance activities are focused on the process used to create the deliverable. They are both powerful techniques and both must be performed to ensure that the deliverables meet your customers quality requirements.

Power Protection System: The Great Technological Innovation

The recent technological evolution has created  new and advanced equipments to carry out day to day tasks. The power protection system is an achievement of technological advancement that releases electric current at the time when the mains power fails to supply electricity due to power  problems like spikes, surges, brownouts and so on. At the same time, the world is engulfed with electrical appliances which are advanced, critical and sophisticated that need constant electricity to run without damage being done to their physical and electrical components. As a result, an installation of the power protection system must be given prominence in locations where these electrical devices are kept.

Several measures are adopted to provide power protection to homes, offices and industrial sectors. There are some power protection systems that are designed to isolate faults from the electrical network and there are some that work to keep the the voltage static while passing from the main electrical circuit. In reality, the power protection system is developed with a purpose to shield the highly sensitive equipment like computers, fax machine, routers, and other critical devices used in both residential and industrial sectors. These electrical appliances need special power protection that can provide constant power backup to run impeccably. With the integration of a built-in fuse, the power protection system is designed to supply power as soon as it detects power criss. The function of the built-in fuse is to let pass only certain amount of power flow that is required to run the electrical appliances and in case the amount of power supply crosses the permissible limit, the fuse will automatically burn. The burning of the fuse indicates that the electrical appliances connected with the power protection system is safe and flawless.

When talking about the power protection system, the first question that comes to your mind is its ability to protect electrical appliances in addition to provide incessant power supply during power failure. But the crux of the discussion is that the device stands to prevent power failure and releases incessant power to electrical appliances during the time of power crisis. However, you can find UPSes that run both manually and automatically with different specifications and wattage capacities to meet power related problems in homes, offices, data centers and various other important sectors where the minutest of power fluctuation may lead to huge loss.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness

What is OEE?

OEE = Availability X Performance Rate X Quality Rate

Availability - Percent of scheduled production (to measure reliability) or calendar hours 24/7/365  (to measure equipment utilization), that equipment is available for production.

Performance Rate - Percent of parts produced per time frame, of maximum rate OEM rated production speed at. If OEM specification is not available, use best known production rate. 

Quality Rate - Percent of good sellable parts out of total parts produced per time frame.

Why use OEE?

 

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) can be used to save companies from making inappropriate purchases, and help them focus on improving the performance of machinery and plant equipment they already own. OEE is used to find the greatest areas of improvement so you start with the area that will provide the greatest return on asset. The OEE formula will show how improvements in changeovers, quality, machine reliability improvements, working through breaks and more, will affect your bottom line.

As you strive towards World Class productivity in your facility, this simple formula will make an excellent benchmarking tool. The derived OEE percentage is easy to understand and displaying this single number where all facility personnel can view it, makes for a great motivational technique. By giving your employees an easy way to see how they are doing in overall equipment utilization, production speed, and quality, they will strive for a higher number!

How to use OEE?

Implementing the Overall Equipment Effectiveness formula in your facility can take on many different forms. It can be used as an analysis and benchmarking tool for either reliability, equipment utilization, or both. Don't let indecision on how to best use OEE become a barrier that prevents you from using it at all. Start out small if necessary, picking your bottleneck to collect the OEE metrics on. 

Once you see first hand what a valuable tool it is, you can gradually take OEE measurements on other equipment in your facility. If you work in  manufacturing , there is no substitute for going out to the shop floor and taking some rough measurements of OEE. You will be surprised by what you find!

While monitoring OEE per equipment brings focus on the equipment itself, it may not provide true cause of major costs, unless the cause is obvious. For example OEE can appear improved by actions such as purchasing oversize equipment, providing redundant supporting systems, and increasing the frequency of overhauls.

To improve your OEE percentage, you will need to use other tools and methodologies available to you, like TDC, RCA, FTA etc. TDC is a relatively new methodology that focuses on True Downtime Cost for justification and making better management decisions. TDC overcomes the main implementation barrier for OEE by giving maintenance managers a tool in which to show actual cost savings in relationship with OEE.

For the ultimate decision making tool, incorporate OEE with TDC.

Front End: Incorporate TDC into your data collection. (contact me for a free power point)

Back End: Incorporate TDC into your software reporting by requiring it of your software vendor.

On a larger scale, you should not only be calculating equipment OEE, you should also be calculating a production line OEE, and within a corporation, a facility OEE. Factory automation companies are starting to incorporate OEE into the reports they generate automatically! There are also a few companies who specialize in providing shop floor data in automatic easy to read OEE reports.

Zero Defects : Getting It Right First Time

How much do quality failures cost your company?

Quality defects have significant costs associated with them – some of the most obvious being money, time, resources, and lost reputation. And programs to eliminate quality defects can be expensive and time consuming. Do you insist on eliminating defects entirely no matter the cost? Or, do you accept that a certain, albeit very small, percentage of defects is acceptable, and just accept the costs and learn to live with them? 

One of the most influential ideas about this was the notion of "zero defects." This phrase was coined by Philip Crosby in his 1979 book titled, "Quality is Free." 

His position was that where there are zero defects, there are no costs associated with issues of poor quality; and hence, quality becomes free.

Explaining the Idea

Zero defects is a way of thinking and doing that reinforces the notion that defects are not acceptable, and that everyone should "do things right the first time". The idea here is that with a philosophy of zero defects, you can increase profits both by eliminating the cost of failure and increasing revenues through increased customer satisfaction.

"Zero defects" is referred to as a philosophy, a mentality or a movement. It's not a program, nor does it have distinct steps to follow or rules to abide by. This is perhaps why zero defects can be so effective, because it means it's adaptable to any situation, business, profession or industry.

The question that often comes up when zero defects is discussed, is whether or not zero defects is ever attainable. Essentially, does adopting a zero defect environment only set users up for failure? Zero defects is NOT about being perfect. Zero defects is about changing your perspective. It does this by demanding that you:

• Recognize the high cost of quality issues.
• Continuously think of the places where flaws may be introduced.
• Work proactively to address the flaws in your systems and processes, which allow defects to occur.
• Zero defects is a standard. It is a measure against which any system, process, action, or outcome can be analyzed. When zero defects is the goal, every aspect of the business is subject to scrutiny in terms of whether it measures up.

When you think about it, we expect zero defects when we are talking about items or services that we use. If you buy a fancy new plasma TV and your pixels start burning by the thousands, you demand satisfaction. When you take the car in for brake service, you expect that the mechanic will install the parts exactly as the manufacturer prescribes. No defect is an acceptable defect when it affects you personally.

So why then, is it so easy to accept that "defects happen" when you are the one producing the product or providing the service? This is the interesting dichotomy that presents itself. Zero defects is one of the best ways to resolve the discord between what we expect for ourselves and what we can accept for others.

However, if you fanatically follow a zero defects approach in areas which don't need it, you'll most likely be wasting resources. One of the most important of these resources is time, and this is where people are accused of time-destroying "perfectionism."

Green Technology and Climate Change

A Brief Overview

Unfortunately, we are just beginning to realize the effects CO2(carbon dioxide) is having on our environmental balance and stability. Carbon dioxide is created naturally from various sources, and then collected by what are known as "sinks", repeating what is known as the "carbon cycle.

There are various natural sources and sinks including:

* Respiration of living organisms: Animals breathe oxygen given off by plants, while expelling carbon dioxide, consumed by plants. Plants use carbon dioxide and soil nutrients to create energy via photosynthesis, which removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it as plant matter.

* Volcanic activity releases carbon dioxide and other chemicals from deep within earth's surface, however, due to the limited occasions in which this occurs, this source is rather small.

* The "Ocean/atmosphere exchange: Carbon dioxide is naturally absorbed by earth's oceans, and released into the atmosphere.

Under natural circumstances, the carbon dioxide released and absorbed through earth's normal processes remains relatively equal.

Factoring in "The Human Element"

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.gov), human activities have only recently begun to interfere with earth's natural carbon dioxide processes. By "recently" we mean around the time of the Industrial Revolution of the 1700's. At around this time, humanity began crafting vast varieties of complex steel machinery and generating electricity at explosive rates. This manufacturing and power generation needed fuel, however, and fossil fuels were not only the most potent, but also the most readily available fuel at the time. Deforestation was also occurring at a much faster rate, which meant less trees and plants to absorb all the carbon dioxide being produced by manufacturing!

What is it doing?

Reportedly, the massive carbon dioxide emissions of recent history have caused a number of ill effects, including rising ocean levels, reductions in dry season rainfall, higher overall global temperatures, and in some cases, even drought. The concern is that excessive "greenhouse gases" in earth's atmosphere could be causing a global increase in temperature, popularly referred to as "global warming". Scientists continue to debate these phenomena however. Some researchers claim that earth goes through various warming and cooling cycles naturally, while others claim that our planet is in dire distress; commonly referring to the gradual melting of glaciers due to higher temperatures in the ice caps.

What can be done?

Currently, a great many nations, including the United States, China, and the United Kingdom, are working to discovery greener technologies that will hopefully slow, if not reverse, the effects of excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Many countries are currently working on processes such as carbon negative concrete, more efficient waste recycling, and even a process called "carbon sequestration", an emerging process in which created carbon dioxide is stored in reservoirs before it reaches the atmosphere. Many natural processes are also being sought out, such as rapidly repopulating forests and using oceanic phytoplankton to absorb, and effectively sequester, excessive carbon dioxide.