Warm and Fuzzy

Posted on September 13, 2015 by george

Automation has replaced armies of clerical workers
(the new pink collar workers)

We all know the drill ” Thank you for calling Modern Company. If you know your party’s extension please dial it now. For sales dial 101, for service dial 102, for HR dial 103, for accounts receivable dial 104, for shipping dial 105, for scheduling dial 106 —- if you wish to hear the options again press 1″ Usually none of the listed extensions match our needs, so we pick one in desperation only to hear a recorded message “Your call is important to us, please call back when our operators are not busy.”
In today’s lean world, nobody has time to sit at their desk waiting for the phone to ring. If you look at the sea of desks they are mostly unoccupied. Many of the players are simultaneously sitting in teleconferences while answering the daily bombardment of 2 to 300 internal e-mails. This overload is unsustainable and the pendulum will swing back to add new controls. Back in era of large companies, the chain of command was expected to correctly filter the information flow. Sending communication to higher than your boss’s boss was not permitted.
It would be nice to think that an instruction manual would be sufficient to accomplish a simple installation like a computer display screen. In the industrial automation arena, equipment is expected to live 7 years with first rebuild giving another 7 years. When you are matching a new display screen to equipment and controls that are more than 10 years old, a generation miss match occurs. Usually a live local technician with many years experience is needed to resolve the problems, especially if the set-up is complicated by having a defective replacement display screen to start with. This is why we pay a premium to buy industrial display screens because warm and fuzzy help is usually needed to get the repair done. Even good live help, last week we lost three days of production sorting out the replacement of a dead computer display screen.
This is an opportunity that start-up companies can use to grow. Most customers want a warm and fussy feeling and react favorably when they are serviced by knowledgeable people who are not remotely located in a call center. The UX (User Experience) movement is all about having your development staff interact with a representative group of users. As we performed the www.mileagetrakker.com beta test we personally got to know all of the beta testers. Since most people learn by interacting with other people, it was natural for the www.mileagetrakker.com beta testers to acquire the knowledge that they needed. As we scale beyond the beta phase, we continue to test which of the introductory activities can be automated on the website and which training and set-up actions require personal involvement by the sales staff. Even though is is possible to accomplish all of the actions needed to acquire a Mileage Trakker device by interacting with the website, the vast majority will join us due to the activity of the sales staff.

Capture your full mileage deduction

The new battle ground in the marketplace will be establishing the correct balance between efficient computerized automation and warm and fuzzy human support. Monopoly power can force customers to fight with faceless computerized non service, but this jeopardizes the continuation of the company. The pendulum will swing back to creating new employment roles for people.

Ad Infinitum

Posted on September 6, 2015 by george

The human ability to invent acronyms is endless

Ad Infinitum
[ad in-fuh-nahy-tuh m]
adverb
1) to infinity, endlessly: without limit
Dictionary.com

The owners of companies invented the concept of auditors to insure that the management was caring for the capital entrusted to their keeping. The inventors of ISO-9000 correctly realized that elevating their cause to the same level as making a profit would accomplish the quantum leap needed to catch the Japanese. They invented metrics that were given acronyms so they looked the same as financial metrics. The war for corporate resources and attention is on. Now that most western companies have quality that is on par with Japanese (We are now chasing the Koreans), the other functional company groups have joined the bandwagon by using metrics and auditors to vie for attention. This battle has resulted in an explosion of acronyms which is expanding ad infinitum. www.acronymfinder.com is now listing over 4 million acronyms and the number is growing daily.
It would be nice to think that a talented individual leading a company could find the complete set of metrics needed to eliminate waste. This is like suggesting that it is possible to enforce perfect compliance to the speed limit by using speed traps. We all know that the more severe penalties applied to reckless drivers make a bigger dent in improving public safety. In this era of proliferating acronyms, data gathering can look like an overwhelming task. It is easy to despair, if you fail to understand the principles behind Pareto analysis.

Most of the profit comes from concentrating on the main chance

Even though all of the metrics that have been assigned acronyms have the potential for spurring an improvement, most of the benefit will occur by focusing on the top three. In a lean operation the front line worker is most aware that simply gathering metrics does not result in an improvement. As diminishing returns set in, many tabulated metrics remain static. Yes even metrics with acronyms have a “best before date”. This is not to infer that I am against gathering data. It is necessary to gather data to know whether the actions that you are contemplating actually generate an improvement. The first law of data gathering applies. [Only the person who gathers the data believes it] Every player on the team is responsible for knowing their numbers. Even the highest paid professional athletes continue to personally track their conditioning plan, in the same fashion that they employed to achieve superstar status. Making an improvement is the intersection of opportunity and the accumulated skills of each player. In a growing organization all players can quantify the improvements that they are making. This occurs because they do not waste time living in the past because they don’t track obsolete metrics ad infinitum.

Jump Frog Jump

Posted on September 4, 2015 by george

Frogs use jumps to escape danger

A researcher wanted to investigate how frogs jump. He invented an experiment to determine the contribution of each leg. He needed a baseline, so he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump!” Measuring the distance, he wrote in his journal “Frogs with 4 legs jump 3 feet.” Cutting off the right front leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump.” Measuring the distance he wrote in his journal “Right front leg contributes .5 feet to jump.” Cutting of the left front leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump!” Measuring the distance, he wrote. ” Left leg contributes .8 feet to jump.” Cutting of the right rear leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump.” Measuring the distance he wrote in his journal “Right rear leg contributes 1.7 feet to jump.” Cutting off the left rear leg, he put the frog down and said “Jump frog jump!” —- “Jump frog jump!” —- “Jump frog jump!” He wrote in his journal “Frogs with no legs are deaf”
We are all aware that it is easier to make good decisions when you have good data to back them up. Designing the affordable experiments to generate good data is where the difficulty starts to appear. This is especially true in a start up, where a lack of accumulated cash limits the number of pivots that can be done to recover from bad decisions. Even if you invent a timely affordable A/B test to guage your customer’s UX [User Experience], as this joke illustrates, many times convenient conclusions are applied to avoid the work that is actually required to provide what the customer is willing to buy.
A good example is a CAD (computer aided drafting) program. Back in the 90’s we still used drafting boards. By the 90’s this was a money issue related to the user experience of the CAD draftsman. The time, effort and cost of creating CAD drawings could not be recovered by the benefits. Since the downstream benefits of CAD drawings are fairly static, it all boiled down to adjusting the program so that making a drawing on the computer was quicker than using a drawing board. As is true during disruptive time, there were many players who saw the future benefits and wished to own the market. AutoCAD succeeded and displaced most other early players by incorporating effective feedback from thousands of CAD users. A/B testing established the CAD 2D drawing interface that has become dominate.
Ah, but the season changes. AutoCAD 2000 finally had all of the features that a large pool of their users ever wanted. This is not good news for a company with a business model based on selling a new version of their software every three years. Yes, there is other market segments that can take advantage of CAD drafting. Unfortunately cluttering the desktop with additional command icons alienated the existing user base. The A/B testing that enabled AutoCAD to achieve dominance, could not uncover a new look that would entice existing users to buy a new version… A good example of trying to extrapolate a convenient conclusion onto real test data. The actual conclusion is that it is necessary to allow the user to customize his desktop, so that it is possible to retain the look and function and minimized keystrokes of the earlier versions. Only then is the added functionality of new software versions interesting to current users. A/B testing will not invent a desktop look that is acceptable to everyone.
The same process applies to my www.mileagetrakker.com device. Our benchmarking against the competition indicated that UX is the battleground. Most business travelers put 12,000 business miles on a vehicle in a year. This deduction puts $2000 in their pocket provided that they have the correct tax records in the required format. Having spent a large part of Christmas vacation inputting the required mileage logs for many years in a row, my wife and I set out to find a better way. In start-up fashion we did A/B testing during the beta phase to discover whether the user wished to interface using a cell phone, texting, e-mail or a web site.

A/B testing is only one of many testing tools to hear the voice of the customer

I suspect that Mileage Trakker would have died if we simply taken the results to infer that it was possible to only offer the most popular method. In this mass customization era, the customers expect that they can choose the option that is best for them. Yes it does take more work on our part.
Mass customization is a paradigm shift. The reduction in computing cost has made it possible to offer your customer base some degree of choice. This reality on the ground will filter back into all of the activity and decision making methods within a business. As this example shows, it is important not to limit your chance for success with myopic vision

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.”

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?

SaaS- Software as a Service

Posted on July 31, 2015 by george

You shall enjoy the fruit of your labor

We are migrating to an economy where more of our intellectual property is embodied in digital format. The practitioners who create this intellectual property are not second class people who are undeserving of the fruits of their labor. Even though the developers who created companies like Twitter were compensated, the venture capitalists who funded this style business model are running out of money. I am aware that many of these start-ups planned an advertising funded business model. However, the available total advertising dollars available means that less than 25% of them will survive. Since the first world nations elected to offshore their manufacturing, insuring that compensation is paid for intellectual property is even more important in reversing balance of trade deficits and eventual bankruptcy.

US trade balance

Enter the SaaS- Software as a Service business model. We are aware that most of the creation cost of intellectual property in digital form is spent making the first copy. Our modern communication and computer technology has reduced the cost of making duplicate copies to almost nothing. This has resulted in an elimination of more than 1/2 of the revenue stream in fields like music, motion pictures and pharmaceuticals. Having seen the fruits of the efforts to create intellectual property siphoned away, prudent planners choose to insure that they will retain the fruits of their effort. “Sometimes the questions are COMPLICATED and the answers are SIMPLE” Dr Seuss Geisel. People who need food on their table and roofs over their heads cannot afford to give away the effort that funds their life. New software will only be sold as SaaS. The development effort to create the first copy will be shared by all users because it will be the only copy. Unfortunately, SaaS is too late for Windows 95, Android, Office that already have generic copies in the marketplace. It is too late to close the barn door after the horses have left. Some of the first SaaS offerings will be in Internet Security. The current system of maintaining defenses on everyone’s computer will fade. The embedded back doors in the basic computer operating systems are the problem. Once the intruders use the back doors to gain control, the first action they perform disables the defenses. Users who wish to enjoy the benefits of secure data and reliable computer operation will discover that SaaS can deliver a service that isolates them from the web hackers and dangers using encrypted links. All communication to the unprotected web will be routed through the proxy server with a resident up to the date SaaS protection program. It is very possible that it will be necessary in the short term to add Wifi or internet dongles to circumvent the unsecured communication hardware that came with the users device. I can picture the entire industry migrating back to a new variation of its roots. In the very beginning, computer users used dumb telex machines to interact with time-sharing computers that housed all of the programs and data.

A Teletype Model ASR_32 by Jamie-Flickr

Industrial Demilitarized Zone

Posted on July 24, 2015 by george

Korean DMZ -picture by Lim Yeongsik search operation Korean armed forces

Just like the north Koreans are continuously trying to penetrate the demilitarized zone, there are hostile elements who use the world wide web as a corridor to attack. Since many historic IoT (Internet of Things) devices have very little protection, a browser program like Shodan can crawl the web and create map of connected devices. “Shodan’s been used to find webcams with security so low that you only needed to type an IP address into your browser to peer into people’s homes, security offices, hospital operating rooms, child care centers and drug dealer operations.”Kashmir Hill September 23, 2013 issue of Forbes. The real question is what do you do to protect your castle. it takes thinking in military terms to protect yourself from attack. I am not surprised that this picture of a turnstile was taken within a communist country. Their society has a lot more military control. It is curious that they think youth hostels are where the control is needed.

PERCo Turnstile Territory of student’s hotel St Petersburg by Bestar

Camouflage is a great military tactic. After you progress past having wide open door to your industrial control by implementing a second 10/100 gate with a guard post, it is helpful to hide your new entrance in plain sight. In programming terms it is called spoofing. The hackers who are using programs like Shodan ignore you if you appear to be an uninteresting application. A USB to 10/100 converter costs less than US $50. The USB driver programs can be configured such that the echo seen by the search engines looks like a baby monitor for example. The only other major requirement is to invent a quick staged authentication so that a DOS (denial of service) attack does not block the legitimate users from logging onto the system.

A simple USB to 10/100 converter can be programmed as a gate keeper

I can picture a time in the very near future when “lights out” manufacturing is IoT enabled. Current impediments such power outages can be remotely corrected if we can trust the remote access.

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