Sunday, December 27, 2009

We Have Met The Enemy ...

The other day I went to fill the gas tank on my car, like I have done thousands of times before. At the gas station I choose, you activate the pump by swiping your credit card, pushing a button to select the grade of gas, and then picking up the nozzle and inserting it into the gas tank.

In this case, after selecting the grade of gasoline I wanted, I went to put the nozzle in the tank, and it wouldn’t fit. I thought I had just missed the opening with careless placement, so I tried again. The nozzle still wouldn’t go in the tank. After the second attempt I realized that the nozzle was too big to fit into the filler tube on my gas tank.

Once I started actually looking at the nozzle, I realized that I had picked up the wrong one. This gas pump had separate hoses for gasoline and diesel fuels, and I had inadvertently picked up the diesel nozzle.

I thought this was a perfect example of a quality control technique called poka-yoke by the Japanese. Loosely translated, poka-yoke means mistake prevention, or mistake proofing. I usually call it idiot proofing. The idea is to design assemblies so that the parts can only go together one way. If they go together only one way, than the parts cannot be assembled incorrectly.

That is poka-yoke in its purest form. But the doctrine of mistake proofing has been used in many different ways. For example, in building an assembly, you can put quality checks in-line with the assembly process. Let’s say you put a switch on a base plate, then drive two screws to hold the switch in place. The next two stations in the assembly process could be a camera, to detect the presence of the two screws, followed by the installation of a cover plate to protect the switch. If you lock the assembly in place at the camera station, and only unlock it to move to the next step if the camera detects the screws, then you cannot put the cover plate on if the screws are missing.

Usually process controls like the one described above can be overridden by the people working on the line (usually a supervisor), which makes them less effective than going the route of designing an assembly that cannot be misassembled.

The problem with giving supervisors an override is that we assume mistakes are a function of poor training, or bad materials, or not caring about the job, or lack of experience. In my experience with the gas pump, however, the source of the error was none of those things. What happened to me was a momentary lapse of attention. So I was glad that the gas pump was designed so that I couldn’t get diesel fuel into the gasoline tank.

My experience with poka-yoke techniques at the gas station brought home another lesson for me.

No matter how much we idiot-proof our systems, we’re always outnumbered.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Recession vs. Recovery

A variety of salesmen have dropped in on me the last week or so. This being the Christmas season, they are making the rounds, bringing gifts to their customers. The table in our office break room is covered with boxes of chocolates and tins of cookies.

Invariably, as part of the visit, they ask how business is going. When I tell them that things are going pretty good, I get surprised looks. They tell me that at most of their customers, business is way off.

Maybe it’s just that my perspective is different. My company’s overall sales are down about 30% from their peak. So from that perspective, business is terrible. But that’s not my point of comparison. I’m comparing where we are now to where we were one year ago.

At the close of 2008, orders from customers were in free fall. Their requirements were dropping faster than we could reduce capacity. In response we took whole weeks out of our production schedule. We shut down for an entire week at Thanksgiving. We shut down for four weeks in December. We took a week off in February, and two weeks off in March. And every time we shut down, another round of people were laid off. It felt like we were on the edge of a precipice.

Finally, in April our business started to pick up again. Just as important, our production capacity was reduced to the point where it balanced with demand again. Since then, our order book has gotten a little stronger, allowing us to call some of the people back off layoff.

Fast forward to the end of 2009. Thanksgiving was a long weekend, not a week. We’re taking the traditional two week maintenance shutdown at the close of this month. The order book for the first quarter of next year is filling up, not getting emptied out by customer cancellations.

I know the economy is not out of the woods yet, that things could turn down again. I know unemployment is still historically high at 10%, and that there are six applicants for every job. Right now, though, things look relatively secure for me and the survivors at my company. So that’s what I choose to focus on in this season of celebration and counting blessings.

The old joke goes that if your neighbor is unemployed, it’s a recession. If you’re unemployed, it’s a depression. I want to add something to that. If you think you are going to lose your job, it’s still a recession. If you think you’re going to survive and stay in business, it’s a recovery.

Here’s to those who are recovering in 2010. It feels pretty good to still be standing. As Winston Churchill put it (in a different context), “there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect.”

Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Annual Christmas Diatribe

Plastic Santas have been pulled out of storage, and lights are strung throughout the neighborhood. Tune in to almost any radio station, and you are sure to hear the sounds of Christmas classics wafting over the airwaves. Envelopes of red and green are starting to appear in mailboxes. It’s that time of year again.

It’s time to rail against the rampant commercialism and compulsory gift giving that have hijacked the Christmas holiday.

If you take the practice of exchanging gifts as commonly practiced, and boil it down to the essentials, here’s what you get: You take your hard earned money, and you buy something for someone that they don’t really need. After all, if they had really needed it, they would have bought it for themselves. In exchange, they take their hard earned money and buy you something that you don’t really need.

Once the gift giving is completed and all the packages are opened, what do you have? (Besides two garbage cans filled with torn off wrapping paper and packaging.) You have a bunch of new stuff that you now have to store.

Americans are the most over stuffed people in the history of the planet. Our walk-in closets are filled to overflowing, so we haul our summer clothes up to attic to make room for the winter clothes. We have two car garages that hold only one car, because the rest of the space is stacked high with stuff, most of which never gets used. We have so much stuff that we rent mini-storage units to hold the overflow.

In an ideal world, we would have only the things we used. Our stuff would exist to take care of us. Instead, too often we spend our energy and money taking care of our stuff.

Besides, having too much stuff, most of the Christmas presents I’ve seen in the last few years are all made in China. So aside from a few store clerks, other Americans are not getting any benefit from our spending. We’re impoverishing ourselves to enrich people on the far side of the world. So much for the economic stimulus given by our rampant commercialism. Think about it: are you a net winner from the on-rush of Christmas spending?

I have to stop. Just thinking about this subject makes me foam at the mouth like a rabid squirrel. Right now I have more froth than a Starbucks cappuccino.

I’m not totally anti-Christmas. I love the festivities, the parties, the gatherings of friends and family that come with the season.

But the mandatory gift giving foisted on us by society? To that I say, Bah, humbug!

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Scary Movie

Do you think vampire movies are scary? How about werewolves? Or maybe you like to watch Jason chop up teenagers in the Friday the 13th flicks. Well, this will scare the bejeezus out of you.

It's an animation showing the level of unemployment in every county in the US, starting in 2007 and progressing to the current time period. The map is color coded, with darker colors representing higher unemployment. Watching the darkness spread across the map over time is like following the progress of a plague or some other epidemic.

It creeps me out.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Afghanistan Troop Surge

President Obama went on television tonight to announce a major expansion of the US forces engaged in Afghanistan. The US will be sending 30,0000 more troops in the very near future. Troop levels will stay high for up to three years, although the President promised that he will start withdrawing US forces no later than 2011.

Although Obama did not label it as such in his speech, this looks essentially the same as George W. Bush's "surge" into Iraq. This is kind of ironic, because Senator Barack Obama was on record as strongly opposed to expanding the US military presence in Iraq at that time.

By the time the surge in Afghanistan is complete, the number of troops will have doubled from the level they were at at the beginning of the Obama administration. Make no mistake about it, an increase of 30,000 troops is a major military push.

If you're very quiet, and you listen very carefully, far off to the northeast you can hear a tiny popping sound.

That's the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee. The one's who just awarded Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.

Their heads are exploding.