A batch of fresh baked cookies brings out the kid in me

I was thinking about how to determine the ideal batch size. Cookies came to mind. The ideal batch size is one when you are eating them. As a lover of cookies, I have tried stuffing a bunch of them in my mouth. It doesn’t work as well as eating them one at a time. Further upstream in the manufacturing process, one no longer is the optimum batch size. In my college days the optimum batch size was six. That was the size of my toaster oven tray. Even though the efficiency gurus suggest that we should eliminate all inventory and make cookies one at a time, that is a good theory that does not work in practice. There is something about the smell of baking cookies that attracts and makes friends. Especially on a Sunday night in a guys dorm when there is no food service. Obviously it was necessary to do an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) raw material order earlier in the week to pick up a roll of cookie dough from the grocery story when the grocery store was open. Only one because that is all that would fit in the dorm micro fridge that I shared with my roommate. Again the batch size was no longer one and increased to a dozen. Going further upstream the cookie dough rolls arrived at the grocery store in case boxes. These were stocked on the shelf from the distribution center arriving in mixed skids. The food batching plant obviously wanted to send full refrigerated trailer loads to the distribution center but for the slower moving products like cookie dough this shipment usually includes a mix of all pre-made refrigerated dough products to reduce scrapping of stale product. Any batch size is theoretically possible. In reality when we chose a width and load limit for the roads, factors like the size of trailers start to govern the equation. Even further upstream in the supply chain, the concept of “pull” scheduling totally falls apart when we get back to the planting of the wheat to make the flour. Planting wheat in one cookie batches makes no sense at all.

Drones will emerge as a means for avoiding traffic jams as the population concentrates into big cites

It will be interesting to see how new delivery methods such as drones affect batch sizes. In this emerging mass customization era, batch size planning also applies to building heavy equipment like excavators. In this market every purchaser wants a machine that is customized for their use. Theoretically the batch size of a sold excavator is one but in the actual market the end users like to buy units is groups of three or five so that they have some opportunity to reduce the number of spare parts that they need to stock. Many of the large components like diesel engines, hydraulic pumps, cylinders are ordered in one year batches of 1000. This is inconsistent with the customers who would like their machines a week or two after they place an order. The solution is to complete the manufacturing until the point that the parts begin to acquire customer unique features. The historical customer behavior influences the upstream batch size planning. Many of the components arrive in “kits.” Building heavy equipment is the sum of organizing and collecting heavy components onto skids that fit into trailers or sea land containers. In the past we saw more 1 TEU containers in ocean shipping. In the US most sea land containers in use are 2 TEU because they are similar in capacity to truck trailers. Lift trucks and pallets sizes also evolve toward the same dimension constraints. In most cases the workers require lifting assists at every step

Gathering heavy items takes a lifting device

I also market a connected car device http://www.mileagetrakker.com that helps people who drive for business save about $1000 to $2000 per year on their tax bill. We give the user the option of recording trip purpose in batch sizes of one using their cell phone or in weekly bunches using the internet. One size does not fit all. Users choose a batch size which fits their work pattern. People that have an unpredictable travel pattern like recording in smaller batches. People with a more stable work pattern tend to like recording trip purpose in weekly batches using the internet because is saves time.