by Gary Mintchell | Apr 18, 2023 | Commentary, News, Productivity
US manufacturers have been moving the actual making of products out of the country for many years. This, of course, is a concern for this country. We’ve seen Germany and Italy and China aggressively move to strengthen manufacturing in their countries. Only recently has there been a concerted effort to bolster manufacturing here.
I’m an internationalist on the one hand, but each country owes it to itself to have solid manufacturing. I wondered a long time ago about the future where we would be required to import products needed in an armed conflict. Well, many organizations including this one are working to restore America’s manufacturing prowess. Making Lean Manufacturing more widespread is a good start.
Industry Reimagined 2030 just released its research report “The State of Lean Manufacturing.” The report aims to vastly increase company adoption by equipping practitioners, external experts, and educators with compelling facts and insights to make Lean highly relevant, friendly, and compelling to the interests and concerns of mainstream manufacturers.
Lean Manufacturing continuously eliminates waste, bottlenecks and improves customer value through employee engagement and utilizing data-driven tools. Seventy-four percent of survey respondents reported productivity gains over 40% without intensive capital investment. Yet only 10-15% of U.S. companies systematically use Lean and reap its competitive and financial benefits.
Lean solves many problems
- raising the level of production capability and worker productivity without intensive capital investment;
- competing against lower labor cost countries;
- creating an engaged workforce;
- building a problem-solving culture;
- truly benefitting from advanced production technology and Industry 4.0;
- becoming agile and resilient in responding to disruption.
Industry Reimagined 2030 surveyed three hundred manufacturers on the performance gains in ten manufacturing areas. The survey included both measurable and qualitative responses. Gains were cross-analyzed by a variety of demographics. The survey prompted respondents to provide personal views on gains and the ways in which Lean was implemented both initially and over the longer-term. Sentiment analysis was performed.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 14, 2023 | Productivity
I like to use outlines to organize longer papers or presentations. They also can be good task lists. I’ve yet to use one that fits my needs. Dave Winer has written a couple—he’s the RSS developer and developer of the first blogging tool I used back in 2003 called Radio Userland, as well as the early developer of outlining tools. His just don’t fit my workflow. I’ve tried OmniOutliner, but I find it hard to write in and export to either Microsoft Word or my blog.
I wrote a long presentation last week, about 6,000 words, using a new application called Bike. It’s developed by Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software. I’ve also used his text editor, Write Paper, which I like. He has another app called Task Paper which I tried but it didn’t really fit my unique needs.
If you like outlining or are curious about organizing your thoughts, try Bike. It’s good.Oh, it’s a Mac app. It harkens back to a Steve Jobs thought about computers as a bicycle for the mind.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 31, 2023 | Operations Management, Productivity, Workforce
I had an opportunity to speak with Ken Fisher, SVP of Product Management & Solutions Consulting at QAD Redzone, about ways the US can maintain continued manufacturing through the use of technology.
Redzone is a leading workforce collaboration and connectivity solution company acquired by enterprise and MES software company QAD. Fisher told me that MES is primarily a management tool. The Redzone solution focuses on front-line workers, although supervisors and managers also benefit from the collaboration tools.
They use OEE as one measure of effectiveness because it’s an easy way to benchmark, a good way to compare. However, Redzone acknowledges that OEE can also be easily gamed by operators and others, so they apply filters to try to standardize data as much as possible. Evaluating success does not stop with OEE. They also go to the controller to check on P&L numbers such as overtime hours worked.
A plant implementing a new MES may see a productivity improvement by as much as 2%, while a typical Redzone implementation results in about a 29% improvement.
The solution is essentially an app that runs on tablets but is also accessible by smart phone. It’s intuitive to use applying familiar tablet technologies. But the solution is not just an app on an iPad. Redzone’s application also includes coaching on how to best use the tools.
A few features:
- Reduces administrative load on operators’ data entry
- Gives a voice to the operator using various chat and communication tools
- Employee engagement enhanced
- Works within a Lean culture
- Includes a skills matrix to find the right person to fill a slot in an emergency
- Allows personnel to pinpoint and deal with anomalies during the day
The impetus of the conversation was a recently completed survey of more than 1,000 plants reporting back on millions of production runs.
These new data from QAD Redzone found that 700 factories raised their overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by an average of 21 points after just one year of using these types of tools. Additionally, a variety of less-tangible benefits were noted, including enhanced communication and collaboration, greater worker engagement and retention, lower absenteeism, enhanced operational flexibility and agility, and more.
Based on actual anonymized production data directly from the plant and equipment, the productivity benchmark report is the largest and most comprehensive study of plant productivity of its kind. The study includes:
- Starting plant performance (OEE) benchmarks by industry
- Resulting OEE uplift and productivity improvement
- How results vary by continuous improvement (CI) maturity
- How results vary by starting point
- Estimated annual savings by plant size
Based on on-site assessments, our Engagement Study explores how 50 plants authentically transformed their levels of frontline engagement by tapping into the laws of human nature.
These plants increased productivity and reduced staff turnover by focusing on these five areas of engagement:
- Connecting teams and individuals
- Ownership of performance
- Autonomous problem solving
- Enabling cross team collaboration
- Feeling competent and recognized
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 20, 2023 | Cloud, Operations Management, Productivity, Software
Press releases and extensive news coverage provoked some thinking about the Metaverse and its assorted technologies—Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), eXtended Reality (XR), and Mixed Reality (MR). It’s enough to distort in one’s mind just what is reality. Some psychologists and philosophers think there is no reality outside of what’s in your head. At this rate, they may be right. I even devoted a podcast to thoughts about this.
Mostly I’ve been exploring AR usually in the form of glasses that project the digital over the physical or VR usually in the form of an eye covering totally immersing you in the digital world. I’ve controlled machines while wearing glasses such as Microsoft’s HoloLens and seen training demos in VR. But VR can be on a flat panel, too. My wife the other day was holding her iPhone up and pointing at the walls of her “reading room.” She was visualizing a piece of furniture.
But I am here today to talk about constraints and overcoming them.
Dijam Panigrahi, COO and co-founder of GridRaster, talked with me the other day.
We started with constraints. Even AR requires a lot of compute power. And memory. And networking/communication bandwidth. Not to mention an electric power source. It’s hard to fit all that into an acceptable form factor. Rumors were that Apple was about to release its long awaited AR and VR products. The rumors pointed to the need for the wearer to have a battery pack clipped on their belt with a cable to the device. (For those who don’t wear pants with belts, well, I have no idea what you would have had to do.)
Panigrahi told me they started from a different point. They saw the power of the cloud plus the power of new communications networks such as 5G. Add to this advances in 3D CAD. Why, they asked, should designers try to put everything into the wearable device. Why not host the data in the cloud and use advanced networking to communicate with the device.
GridRaster does not design and sell end user devices. It works with any device and cloud service. It has what they call a unified and shared software infrastructure that enables enterprise customers to run AR, VR, XR, and MR applications.
Here are some underlying ideas and technologies:
- Ultra-low latency high fidelity remote rendering using distributed GPUs for graphics heavy computing for high-fidelity rendering without time-consuming polygon reduction, and wirelessly streaming the solution to headsets, mobile phones, and tablets.
- Millimeter precision 3D AI based spatial mapping achieving accurate 3D spatial mapping with high fidelity 3D scene reconstruction, scene segmentation, and 3D object recognition using 3D computer vision and deep learning-based AI running on discrete GPUs on the server.
- Auto scaling and deployment using DevSecOps applying gaming tools and concepts in a cloud native environment that allows for agile, secure, and rapid development, deployment, and operations on the cloud/on-premises. GridRaster uses Kubernetes for deployment and scaling. It follows a CI/CD pipeline for deployment of its services into the cluster following the best practices and CNCF graduated projects. This enables loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable, and future proof.
- Easy API-based integration open architecture approach enables a frictionless onboarding and seamless integration with existing content formats and provides future proof cross-platform support. This also allows the platform to integrate with other systems to share data and allow for interoperability.
And some use cases:
DESIGN & ENGINEERING
Enables Real-time Collaboration for Rapid Prototyping
- Enables quick iteration on the ideas and concepts
- Clearer communication among team members
- Quick decisions.
- Precise overlays of virtual models on real-world on any commercially available mobile devices, HMDs, smartglasses and PCs in real-time.
REMOTE MAINTENANCE, REPAIR AND TRAINING
- Enables photo-realistic visualization and remote collaboration.
- Create a virtual environment close to real world settings, along with photo-realistic product visualization and real-time collaboration, so that the most effective environment can be created for remote maintenance, repair and training.
LARGE SCALE SIMULATIONS AND TRAINING
- Manages ultra-realistic mixed reality simulations.
- Combines the best of the gaming and traditional simulations to provide a massive multi-user and multi-platform ultra-realistic large world simulations in AR,VR and MR.
- Provides a cloud-based agile and secure deployment and operation that distributes complex computations across compute server nodes and handles scaling in real time using Kubernetes.
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 11, 2023 | Personal Development, Productivity
Futurist, X-Prize guy, longevity researcher Peter Diamandis appears in my email inbox regularly. This email about emails caught my attention. I receive about a hundred a day. Many are from PR professionals seeking attention for their client.
Evidently they all went to the same school and bought the same template. The subject line seldom tempts me. The opening paragraph attempts to set a context with a trend or recent news item. Then there are a couple of filler paragraphs containing generic marketing words. If I have stuck with it this long, by the fourth paragraph or so, they discuss a little of the product or solution with an invitation for me to publish a guest article (which I don’t do) or an interview that, if I’m lucky, contains five possible topics.
I know several things from this.
- They have no personal relationship with me
- They have not looked at my blog
- They do not know what I write about
- They do not know if I’ve covered the topic previously
- They cannot come to the point
Therefore, I offer this summary of Diamandis’s post on emails. Visit his site for deeper analysis.
- Keep it under five lines
- Make the subject line unique, meaningful, and searchable
- Use easy-to-read formatting
- Put your specific action request in the first line
- Make the ask really simple—make it hard to say “no”
- If something is really urgent, don’t email—call or send a text
by Gary Mintchell | Jan 11, 2023 | Personal Development, Productivity
Engineers solve problems. Isn’t that what engineering school is all about in the end? Some classes push knowledge. Most of the classes are about solving problems. Most of those involve math.
In this week’s (January 11, 2023) Akimbo podcast entitled More or Less, Seth Godin discusses the paradox of more or less. If we search more on Ecosia, we cause more trees to be planted that will offset the carbon dioxide we pump into the air when we drive to work. As engineers working in manufacturing and production, we are encouraged to help produce more. But also with less waste. We know that some waste, say methane leaks around the facility, also contribute to climate change.
As Seth “rants” on the subject, his logic points toward “better.” Maybe in my life I don’t need more of something or to make do with less of something else. Maybe I need to pursue better. And better is not always more expensive. I like a good wine. Sometimes I’ve had some excellent wines that were very expensive. We like a wine imported from Spain that I buy on sale from my local beverage store for $9.00. It is great with our dinner or for sipping.
Let us consider that concept of better.
Are we solving the better class of problems? Or, maybe just more of the easier problems that might gain us a little recognition? Or, fewer problems because we are “quiet quitting”?
I suggest that we work on the big problems. The problems that matter. The better problems.
And if you are not listening to Seth Godin each week, you are missing stimulation for your brain.
