The Extra Mile and One Half

Posted on August 28, 2015 by george

We all use milestones to measure our progress

Those of us who actually go the extra mile know that you really have to travel a little bit farther than that to get the job done.
Jesus declared in the Sermon on the Mount “Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two.” (Matthew 5:41, (NASB)) “impressment” allowed a Roman soldier to conscript a non Roman citizen to carry his equipment for one Roman mile (milion = 1,000 paces, about 1,611 yards)– no easy task considering a Roman soldier’s backpack could weigh upwards of 100 pounds (45.4 kg).
The concept of the extra mile applies heavily to quoting contract manufacturing. After you learn to quantify and price everything it takes to do a job, you discover that you also have to plan for the extra mile. This reflects the fact that everything will not go perfectly. Most industries have a multiplication factor before profit which is applied to the computed cost. This adjusted cost is a much more realistic value when the accounting is done at the end. This type of feedback loop is embedded in making a profit. It would not have been possible for me to turn around a few manufacturing companies without basing these factors on historical experience. The fact that all projects have built in inefficiency creates a lean consulting industry.
The volatile nature of employment these days causes many people to put in the extra mile on the highway in traffic jams. Not everyone clocks the extra mile willingly, as Jesus suggested, which is why we hear about road rage.

. Our daughter when she was young was stuck in traffic with her mother. She weighed in on the topic. “You know traffic has an end. You just have to go there.” Ah! Wisdom out the mouths of babes. For those of us who are unable to go to traffic’s end, we need to adjust to the longer commutes. Many people who drive for business find that the old approximate methods of estimating mileage for their expense reports miss some of the miles needed to make the actual trip. This is why people who choose to use a www.mileagetakkker.com device to automatically tabulate their trips in IRS format end up money ahead.

Virtual

Posted on August 21, 2015 by george

William Shatner and Julie Newmar of Star Trek by NBC television

Being a Star Trek fan, I remember the original episode that incorporated film footage from the first pilot. In that pilot, the Star Trek team encounter an advanced race that inserted illusion into their minds with such precision that it replaced reality. The stuff of science fiction except for the fact that we are beginning to have that technology. Google with others have invested a billion dollars or so into a Florida Start-up named Magic Leap. They are in a technology category called augmented reality but they like to call it “cinematic reality”. Unlike some of the other virtual reality technologies. their method of projecting light directly at the eye is a lot less likely to make you sea sick. The images that it creates are so convincing that you think that your hand is the illusion when you try to touch the projected images. Before you dismiss this technology as a video game, be aware that there are commercial uses for a technology that can display activity beyond the vision of your eyes.

Full flight simulator by
Super Jet International (uploaded by russavia)

The next time you are flying, it will be comforting to know that the potentially new pilot flying the plane is not using this flight as a training tool to hone his ability to land the aircraft under all kinds of adverse conditions. Modern virtual reality in the form of flight simulators allows pilots to practice landing at many of the airports of the world. We are happy to know that the pilot flying the plane has practiced landing enough times to react instinctively to the turbulence around him. Other things, we would like to “see”, are hidden inside opaque objects, occur too fast or slow, are not our scale, lack contrast, or have other mismatches. In the molding industry the filling process is occurring inside an opaque mold at extremely high speed. As we adjust the shapes to improve the part quality it is helpful to have a virtual testing tool to guide our efforts. This technology reduces the amount of expensive trial and error mold changes needed to achieve a commercial yield from the mold.

Mold fill simulation software of the “brain” of a Ford Transmission by Magmasoft

In the emerging mass customization era, we do enough part set-ups that we can no longer afford to tie up the production equipment to train the robots. The availability of 3D models for the parts and equipment makes offline pre-programming of the robot path commonplace. This matches the Japanese SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Die) strategy invented by Segeo Shingo. Job shops who employ welding robots are the heaviest early adopters of this virtual technology. It is easy to more than double the through-put of a robot welding cell when you can minimize the time that it is not burning
the arc

Robot motions can be taught remotely

Store High In Transport

Posted on August 16, 2015 by george

Aerial view of grounded ship Rena 04 by New Zealand Defense force from Wellington

Ocean shipments of “fertilizer” had their containers labeled Store High In Transport so that the moisture that was a part of being stored near the bottom of the hold would not dissolve the contents. In much the same fashion as we honor the contribution of a British Sanitary Engineer, the contraction has become a part of the English language. The concept of storing high In transport is not as attractive these days, because the highest containers in the stack are the first to be jettisoned into the sea when trouble is blowing. Mostly novice shippers get caught by this fact. A good friend of mind told a story of someone he knew who wanted to bring the secret of caramel filled chocolate bars to Jamaica. He bought a surplus candy making line and loaded it into a container for shipment from Canada to Jamaica.

Chocolate encapsulates some delicious fillings

The secret remains safe with Davy Jones. The container with the candy making equipment is at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. It is easy to see that this container was not shipped using a capable process. As we eliminate waste, it becomes evident that we need a container ship that is less likely to jettison containers. Innovations like that usually come out of the military. The multi-hull littoral combat ships are much more stable in rough weather. It is very likely that a catamaran would make a great container ship and result in a fuel saving as well. From a lean standpoint it is a lot easier to load containers as they are delivered without staging in a yard. Yard staging is a current requirement because the shippers who pay for premium container placement want their containers at the bottom of the stacks. This queuing and staging can easily double the transport time and cause many shippers to choose higher cost air freight. If the majority of containers are directly transferred between boat and truck or train, autonomous vehicles can be implemented to create an automated storage and retrieval system for the rest. We will implement driverless trucks. The first place you will see them in use is in captive applications like docks or yards. It is a whole lot less risky to implement this high level automation when the speeds are a lot slower and people can be excluded from the transport paths. I would not surprise me if the first driverless “trucks” also have a custom shape that matches their task.

Automatic Guided Vehicle
in Hamburg port by HeJe

Chaos

Posted on August 14, 2015 by george

We live in a time of chaos

“There are some times when you can predict weather well for the next 15 days. Other times, you can only really forecast a couple of days. Sometimes you can’t predict the next two hours.”
DJ Patil, 37, an expert in chaos theory

The current business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. In a time of chaos, predicting what will happen next has gotten exponentially harder. Uncertainty is universal in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle to plan what they should do. I have a daughter who is entering the workforce. How can I tell her what to get into when all of my accumulated experience cannot answer that question for myself? And even if my vision is good enough to know what the current options are, I am certain that the season will quickly change and a different normal will emerge. I was discussing this with my wife, a start-up entrepreneur. She pointed out that the majority of people need a pattern to guide their life. Serious strife and unrest occur when a sizable percentage of the population does not know how to acquire a living wage. All of the A/B testing that we accomplish as start-up businesses establish which applied efforts are profitable in the emerging marketplace. As these get built into the standard work instructions that are part of our manufacturing legacy, the world seems a lot less scary to the typical employee. Most employees need a detailed blueprint of the activities that add up to earning a living wage.
Your gyro-copter is perfectly safe in the hanger at the airport. Heading out on the runway exposes you to the unseen wind vortexes lurking in ambush.

Turbulence in the tip vortex NASA Langley Resarch Center

My best friend would not have ventured out into the chaos of a jet vortex, if he could have predicted the shift of winds that caused it to hover over the runway. As we integrate drones into our lives, they are also buffeted by the same fickle winds. In this time of chaos, it will take time to acquire the experience needed to create the new business patterns to guide us around the pitfalls.
Charles Darwin foreshadowed periods of chaos when he described natural selection: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

Global Positioning

Posted on August 9, 2015 by george

Satellites used for glodal positioning circle the globe.

As little children we are taught the story of Hansel and Gretel who are faced with the challenge of finding their way home in an unfamiliar woods. As we all remember they discovered that pebbles as signs along the way create a map to follow. This lesson went to our hearts and the automobile clubs led the charge to install street and route signs at every fork in the road. Navigation using signs is a workable method as long as it is daytime and the weather cooperates. I can remember my mother turning on the porch light as a beacon to guide out of town visitors to our house.

Safe travel has long been based on line of sight
position references

Lighthouses have long been used as beacons to guide sailors safely back to port. During the second world war a concerted effort was made to improve on visual position references. The British development of radar branched into the creation of LORAN.(short for LOng RANge navigation) It was not until the introduction of solid state electronics in the 1970s that marine and military use of LORAN became common. This system used a grid of land radio beacons to calculate the position of ships and planes. Most of the positioning systems still in use today are an evolution of the original LORAN. The position of a GPS receiver is calculated by timing the transmission from 3 or more transmitters in known locations. The measured position accuracy improves if the transmitters are closer or there is fewer obstructions. This is why we primarily use satellite or cell phone based GPS today.
I would like to report that our GPS navigation systems are infallible in their calculation of location. Even though they work most of the time, certain types of obstructions such as parking garages and metal buildings block or reflect the signals. Applications that require continuous guidance, such as the autonomous vehicles that I helped design for warehouse delivery, have additional local beacons to provide sufficiently accurate location. This also overcomes the intentional dithering that the US military adds to the satellite GPS signals. Other useful devices that use GPS locations, such as my www.mileagetrakker.com ,have an embedded workaround that makes the temporary loss of location user invisible. Even though this level of coding is complicated, the user experience is greatly enhanced.

Capture your full mileage deduction

Many of the things that we are trying to achieve are related to our current location. It is not surprising that some of the most successful automation effectively utilizes embedded GPS calculations.

Endurance Limit

Posted on August 7, 2015 by george

Going on forever has always been a dream of mankind

ENDURANCE LIMIT

In fatigue testing, the maximum stress which can be applied to a material for an infinite number of stress cycles without resulting in failure of the material

We reached a new milestone. The average age of registered cars in the US is now 11.5 years. This is probably the high water mark. There are a number of factors behind this assertion.
(1) The automakers are only required to stock service parts for 10 years. This means that it might not be possible to get repair parts for more than 1/2 the cars that are on the road in the portion of the vehicle life that they are needed.(Aftermarket repair parts are available for most high volume models- usually only about 2/3 of the cars made). Purchasing a used Smart car because it has an attractive price, may not look so smart after it is 10 years old and no service parts are available.
(2) The economy is slowly improving.
(3) Probably most significant is that the government imposed rapid fuel economy improvement targets. To meet those targets, the current crop of new cars is being built out of light weight materials that have not been in vehicle use for 10 years.

Today’s fuel efficient cars are made from lightweight materials that do not have a longevity history.
Picture by Joe Bain-Car Crash

As manufacturers we are attracted to the advantages of processing plastics. Most of the smoke and dirt associated with creating parts out of metal disappears. The lower processing temperatures of plastics opens the door for robotic “lights out” plants. The big disadvantage is that plastics do not have an endurance limit. When you wish to buy a car that has a 11.5 year average operating life, you hope that it is made out of materials that can withstand the millions of imposed stress cycles that it will see during that life. The cars that are on the road today have skeletons that are mostly made of steel. Steel has an endurance limit. It is possible to apply stresses infinitely below a certain value without damaging the part. Having just replaced a plastic rear door handle, I can report first hand that it is just a matter of time before the plastic car parts are operated beyond their life. Having started my career as a suspension design engineer, I suspect that the recent crop of record breaking recalls, such as the Jeep suspension recall, are just the the vanguard of the flood.

The average age of US owner occupied housing is 34 years. About one third of that housing is 40 to 70 years old. Fortunately, much of the pressurized plumbing in the oldest housing is steel. Aside from the tendency to rust, it will not fail due to the contained pressure. We have grown accustomed to the reliability of the copper plumbing in the majority of our housing. In my experience it is not 100% free of leaks, but they are rare. Plastic plumbing is the most common material for new construction today. In normal chicken and egg fashion we will not know which of the various plastics used in the latest plumbing will have the expected 70 year life until the time has past. Due to the fact that I am currently recovering from a complete separation of a plastic connection within a five year old sink faucet, I can confidently predict that some evolution of design and material is still required. (I witnessed a wide open pipe making a flood like this picture)

Water leaks can seriously damage a home

We normally shut off the main water valve to our house when we are out of town. This is a good thing in that the plastic ice maker feed line leaked upon re-pressurization the last time we returned. I wonder if there is an emerging market for an automatic water shut off valve to prevent leaks from going undetected while the home is unoccupied?

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Monthly Archives: August 2015