DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT
Educationfor Innovation (sm)
My mother would be proud. She believed in education - she didn't know what all the courses and degrees meant but she knew that it meant more than she had. In 1933 at age 16 my mother entered this factory where for 7 years she tapped heels onto the soles of shoes, tap tap, tap tap. Seven years... So if you are looking for the Lake St. Shoe factory story, the place where she worked hammering heels onto shoes, click on the Sempco Education for Innovation (sm) story.
The Lake Street shoe shop is still there, but it's filled with new companies, new stories, new immigrants building their own American dream - SEMPCO, Education for Innovation (sm) - it lifted me!
A close-up of the Southern Pine floors in the International Shoe factory on Lake St. in Nashua, NH. Built in 1909, this factory housed 1200 workers who made 7000 shoes per day. Look closely for the indentations on the floor marking where the operator stepped on a foot pedal thousands of times. This site epitomized the process dreams of Frederick Taylor in which motion study and standards determined how people worked, in fact how they became extensions of the machines. Most workers here were piece workers performing a single segment of the entire shoe-making operation. They accumulated 1 x 3" strips of onion skin tags from the lots they finished, turning them in at the end of the week to get paid. I was told that if the tags got lost, the worker was not paid. Below, a photo of the first set of stairs at the main entrance to the shoe shop. Note the edges worn down by the footfalls of thousands of workers who all entered by this main door, slipped past the Paymaster's Office, and climbed the stairs to their machines.
As a dyslexic and a founder, Director and first Treasurer of the first public Charter School in Massachusetts, I've seen and experienced first-hand the deficiencies in our education "system". That's why Blue Heron launched our "Education for Innovation (sm) Series," starting with the SEMPCO story - hands-on learning! Innovation - it's in our DNA! See April 13 WSJ feature "Educating The Next Steve Jobs," about how to make our educational system the place where we create Innovators!
***
***
Steve Jobs speaking on the role of technology:
"We've pioneered the whole medium of computer animation, but John (Lasseter) once said - and this really stuck with me - 'No amount of technology will turn a bad story into a good story.'... That dedication to quality is really ingrained in the culture of this studio," - To Infinity and Beyond! 2007, from I, Steve, Steve Jobs in His Own Words, edited by George Beahm, Agate 2011***
Young Money, Inside The Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-crash Recruits by Kevin Roose, Grand Central Publishing, 2014
Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity.
Q: What's the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?
A: A pigeon can still make a deposit on a SoHo loft.
Eight portraits of millennials riding the ups and downs of the post-2008 Wall St. world, how they were recruited, trained and welcomed into 100-hour workweeks, big bonuses, drug-fueled partying, and what happens next... Questions about morality, limits, addictions good and bad, and figuring out what to do "when I grow up." An engrossing look into this generation's Pearl Harbor, the financial meltdown and everything that followed.
***
6/3/13 - will be tweeting live from the Lean Healthcare Summit, Orlando, Fla 6/4 - 6/6 - keynotes include giants in healthcare reform Dr. John Toussaint, also Alan Gleghorn, Helen Zak, Jim Womack - let's see what we can find in the areas Toussaint believes are key: transparency, billing, quality, outcomes, IT.
11/14/12 - Mid-point in the old Rhodes 19 hull #2 sailboat saga. Twenty years ago we somehow located a real sawmill. We needed lumber to replace rotted ribs in Moonshadow, the boat we acquired two weeks before we got married - I call it my dowry. Bartlett's Farm in Salisbury is the oldest family-owned farm and sawmill in Massachusetts, 11 generations. So 20 years and more rotting ribs later we needed more lumber, and the sawmill - of course! why would you expect that after 11 generations a little old sawmill would stop running - was still right there! And Mr. Bartlett remembered us! So one more speedy trip up Route 95, right along the Merrimac River, and the fields! The fields! Gives me that soft shivery feeling right under my sternum. Plus they've got Holsteins, my favorite cows, grew up in Pepperell down the street
from a small herd across from the Nissitissit River. Nothing more lovely, so here they are - the sawmill, the fields, and my Holsteins. Doug got his lumber, a long winter project.
10/15/12 - Thanks to my friends at AccuRounds CEO Michael Tamasi and VP of Ops Patrick O'Connell, for sharing their Made in The Americas, in Massachusetts in fact, elegant, pristine, stone-cold quiet, beautifully automated gem. Shows just how much private ownership, great vision and innovative thinking can do. Says Tamasi "not perfect," but damn close. Two opportunity areas? Strategic sourcing, especially when production doubles - soon - with new Swiss machines, and IT. More on this gem later. My mother, the original Mill Girl, would be very proud.
9/27/12 - Had a great time at the NE Shingo Conference in Worcester - big crowd, serious speakers and listeners. Massachusetts mfg enjoying a mini-Renaissance, amazing!
9/18/12 - Thanks to my friends at Boston APICS for welcoming me back - it's been a longgg time and I loved re-meeting you all. It pleased the Mill Girl to hear all the great forward-thinking work you are doing - education, conferences, the Town Hall, and systems innovation! From the heart of our innovation machine!
9/11/12 - Former Navy Seal Glen Doherty, age 42, of Winchester, Ma, one of four Americans killed in Benghazi during the attack on the consulate, was the son of Sandy Island camper Barbara Doherty. We remember Barbara talking with great pride about how her son was going to become a Navy Seal. We've since learned that his Navy career included sniper duty and a number of unusual rescue operations. Glen was a pilot, a EMT, a sniper, and an athlete.
R. I. P. Glen and thank you for your service.
http://fandaily.info/news/sonja-johnson-former-navy-seal-glen-a-dohertys-ex-wife-photo/
9/15/12 -
Question: How much of the world's oil comes from Libya?
2%
24%
37%
You'll find the answer under Nikki's photo at the bottom of page 1.
9/13/12 - Mark Graban in a LinkedIn post asked how the Apple/Foxconn NYT controversy could relate to healthcare, pharma Lean Six Sigma. Here's The Mill Girl's response:
Mark, the numbers tell the story. We do in fact manufacture billions of dollars of healthcare products - medical devices, orthotics, dental health products, medical monitoring devices, medicines, cables, tubing, small plastics, etc. globally. Phillips, for example, produces 20B Euros/yr globally, with 7% growth in medical (vs 5% lighting). Johnson and Johnson $65B revenues are also generated by many smaller global operations with a range of production and scm methods. There are other healthcare, medical and pharma global corporations with similar financials - GE, Siemens, Stryker, etc. Those are big numbers, and if Lean Sigma is not a major factor in production or scm for numbers like these, then something is missing. Globally, the manufacturing of products outsourced from The Americas, particularly those in the plastics category, is conducted with high labor content, hence the need for excellent and profitable work practices, efficiencies, etc. like the questions that naturally come out of the stories from the NYTimes. (Incidentally, we cannot completely buy into the NYTimes Foxconn stories). But the tremendous financial and human value of improved scm and mfg methods in these high value medical device and pharma industries deserves the kind of discipline LSS could bring them. The question remains, however, as to whether these methods can be delivered on a global scale to preserve profits not at the expense of quality or labor. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
9/7/12: The Tragedy of Outsourcing Oh and one more thing. Was berated by a sensei for questioning his dictum that all workers remain standing at all times. Give me a break already. He should try standing up in a little cell for 12 hours assembling radios. He might feel different around his swollen ankles.
But this brand of stupidity isn't confined to China. I toured a radio assembly plant in Georgia where a female worker stood in a small black lightless booth to test the audio on car radios - hours and hours at a time - high volume, low, cycle, repeat. Reminded me of my mother tapping heels on shoes for 7 years, tap tap tap.... tap tap tap.
1. There has to be a better way, and
2. Hard to listen seriously to the talk about changing manufacturing's "image" when there are such work practices still out there.
Samsung in hot seat over abusing Chinese workers - DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG myfoxdc.com
By YOUKYUNG LEE AP Technology Writer SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Fresh off a billion-dollar loss in a patent fight with rival smartphone maker Apple, embattled Samsung Electronics Co. now finds itself accused by a labor rights...
9/6/12: What do the White Socks Guys get from a 4 to 1 import/export imbalance?
Back at the height of outsourcing, was invited to Fortune magazine Brainstorm conference. There were 3 of us from mfg - Michael Marks CEO Flextronics, a guy from Gartner, and me, the Mill Girl. We were skunks at the garden party. Everybody said we were getting out of the mfg business - we were becoming a service economy, two classes - the creative class and the worker bees. It was hard to do my speech and hard to listen to the others, very hard. I knew there were big wads of green changing hands & some lobbyists and others got very rich from outsourcing. But look what it has done! My mother, the original Mill Girl would be so disappointed - "you can do better!" she always said. And we can. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
On August 23rd, the Economic Policy Institute released a briefing paper, "The China Toll ─ Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011, with job losses in every state, written by...
***
8/9/12: Good News from our publisher Amacom - thank you Amacom! - that The Incredible Payback English rights for India, Indonesia and Malaysia have been sold to BPI India, ISBN 9788184975321, so the book is now available in hardcover! This book has legs!
In The Incredible Payback we talked about the fact that 80 - 90% of costs, in automotive for example, come from the supply base, and about 10% from the production line. It would make sense then that there are a lot more savings opportunities in the 90%. We showed how the 90% is a source of savings for indirect materials (computers, travel, office suppliers, etc) as well as direct materials, such as supplier parts. Nelson and I believe focusing on the 90% through strategic sourcing, which includes category management - and there are some graphs to back it up - gets you beyond a narrow focus on production labor costs. Although Frederick Taylor might protest, almost 100 yrs later this makes sense. In Advanced Mfg labor (and therefore traditional standards) are a smaller portion of total costs. The graphs show that anybody can save 5% without much work, 10% requires some buying expertise, 20% or more means you are best in class strategic sourcing. But we don't call Strategic Sourcing "lean purchasing" because it's not about lean. It's about understanding the market, the product, the technology, the category, trends, etc. This is a tough concept but there are some companies like Honda and Nissan who really understand how to leverage this. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
8/6/12 Lean is an assumption, IT is a necessity. Mike Orzen and Steve Bell, co-authors of Lean IT, the book just reviewed in Blue Heron Journal - click on title in left sidebar - got back to me about the book review. Mike and I agreed to disagree. I was disappointed that the book focused on history followed by a lot of discussion on applying lean principles to IT processes. That's not the point. As my mother, the original Mill Girl hammered into me, "you can do better." IT is the critical piece for The Third Industrial Revolution (sm) - lean is an assumption, the foundation, but what we need is the big road map charting out how we are going to integrate all the separate, scary technology systems - demand sensing and risk management, Big Data mining, etc. - to build and run The Future of Manufacturing. PLUS we've got to scrape off the rust and fix the B.O.M., part master, routings, etc., that corroded after SOMEBODY unplugged the computers. We'll keep working it, we've got some examples of companies doing pieces of the tough stuff. It's what we did at Briggs & Stratton when we started JIT way back. It's doable. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
7/24/2012 It hurts me that US manufacturing got into such a precarious state. I get upset when I think that we have spent many years working on either the wrong things, or neglecting the right ones. We've closed too many factories, killed too many jobs, and neglected our infrastructure. We unplugged the computers and many schools dumbed down math and science. My mother - and she was a real mill girl, 7 yrs putting heels on shoes, tap tap tap, tap tap tap - would be so disappointed - she always said, "Patricia, you can do better!" And in fact we can! Steve Jobs told the President that if he had had 35k mfg engineers he would have kept the iPad in the US!
And we know there is huge opportunity out there now for manufacturers in The Americas. Here are more numbers from NAM "Facts About Manufacturing" at http://www.nam.org/Statistics-And-Data/Facts-About-Manufacturing/Landing.aspx that reflect where we are at:
The United States is the world's largest manufacturing economy, producing 21 percent of global manufactured products. China is second at 15 percent and Japan is third at 12 percent.
U.S. manufacturing produces $1.7 trillion of value each year, or 11.7 percent of U.S. GDP. For every $1.00 spent in manufacturing, another $1.35 is added to the economy.
Manufacturing supports an estimated 17 million jobs in the U.S.—about one in six private sector jobs. Nearly 12 million Americans (or 9 percent of the workforce) are employed directly in manufacturing.
In 2010, the average U.S. manufacturing worker earned $77,186 annually, including pay and benefits. The average worker in all industries earned $56,436 annually.
U.S. manufacturers are the most productive workers in the world—far surpassing the worker productivity of any other major manufacturing economy, leading to higher wages and living standards.
U.S. manufacturers perform two-thirds of all private sector R&D in the nation, driving more innovation than any other sector.
Taken alone, U.S. Manufacturing would be the 9th largest economy in the world.
What do you think?
If you believe we have a shot at it, and you want to join me in the Revival of Mfg in The Americas, stand up. Do it for yourself, do it for your kids, do it in memory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory workers who didn't make it, do it in memory of the child laborers in Lewis Hine's photos, do it in memory of Apple's supplier workers in China who jumped off the roof. Let us know - tell me your story - write to us at blueheronjournaleditor@gmail.com. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
***
From Lewis Hine notes: "1911 child labor photo Group of 66 spinners in #7 spinning room. They were the most openly profane and vulgar I have ever encountered in mill work. Florida St. Cyr (smallest girl), 24 Cray St. Location: Chicopee, Massachusetts." Hine photographed child workers in other operations as well, including the Glenallan Mill in Winchendon, Massachuestts. Hines notes and photos drove the child labor reform initiative in the US pre-WWI.
6/21 -
This is why we need to bring manufacturing back from China - in the Progressive Era, we passed child labor laws. These protections have been in place for years, plus we have the resources to make manufacturing more automated, with fewer unskilled workers, more manufacturing engineers, and better productivity. It's time. Yet another reason why we need to bring whatever manufacturing we can back - 1934 Women mill pickets arrested. Women textile workers being escorted by policemen following arrest for picketing the Jackson mill (on the Merrimac River, upstream from the mill city of Lowell) in Nashua, New Hampshire. This is the same mill in which Korean immigrant Mr. Ro, in our Education for Innovation (sm) SEMPCO story, started his first business on a platform over the turbine in the wheelhouse. Can you imagine what it would have taken for these female mill workers to organize and risk being arrested, or worse, in the depths of the Great Depression? Had to be "nothing to lose." Approaching the end of New England's textile era, things were getting tougher.
6/20 - Rapid prototyping, leads to one-off mfg, leads to Advanced Mfg? My friend Andy Coutu, president of R & D Technologies, let me spend the day with his Objet Geometries 3D printers making all sorts of elegant and precise parts from CAD files, in minutes! Wash them off with plain old water and they're ready to go. Cheap and fast, every engineer wants one sitting on his desk. The question is, is this technology one of the key pieces of The Third Industrial Revolution (sm)? I'm betting.... A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
6/19 - Supply Chain mapping?
Last week asked three experts what tools Toyota is using to map their ENTIRE supply network, and no one could say. Although I know that the tools are out there, and I am rooting for Toyota and others to conquer this challenge, I'm thinking that we probably went too far with Outsourcing and lost control of third and fourth and fifth tier intelligence. I love IT, but most companies aren't up to doing something as big as this, an undertaking that has the scale and risk level of the Manhattan Project, for example, which was completed partly with Rules of Approximation and slide rules. Even if we COULD map an entire and complex supply chain, there are definitely some strategic outsourcing decisions that shouldn't have been made. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
6/1/12 - Culture change? Whenever I hear the words "culture change" I get scared. But when I look at the great IT tools that are available for suppliers, on top of a good lean foundation, I breathe better. We really need to think about the total system for running global supply networks. As the companies that struggle with supply chain disruptions - Toyota, for example - have learned, losing chunks of your profit margins can happen in the blink of a tsunami or a flood - it's that fast. A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal
Apologies for the dust and commotion - we are renovating. We've been moving our Books around and it's been quite strenuous. Next we attack Features, Interviews, photos and Emu and that should be less messy! Thank you for your patience! The Proprietor
***
Plug the computers back in, people, and Help Save Elvi:
A Cry for Help from Elvi, California buyer/planner, via LinkedIn:
"I was hired 2+ years ago and it's been very difficult trying to work without MRP... I've tried to get our MRP going and it's been very difficult...Our part number descriptions are very confusing. They need some kind of logic to them and I'd like them to follow a uniform standard..." She manually updates Excel spreadsheets. Time to plug the computers back in folks, fix the rusted out infrastructure - you can't bring manufacturing back to the Americas on Excel spreadsheets!
Had a good discussion with Mike Orzen, co-author of Shingo Research prize winning book Lean IT. We talked about behavior and culture and which comes first. We agreed and we disagreed. His book is about IT, which is hugely important now in mfg/scm, but it didn't go far enough. And the Shingo Guidelines basically don't address how companies should develop a strategy to plug the computers back in, repair our rusted out infrastructure and harness IT. So was left with the question, where is Shingo on Information Technology?
***
MIT LGO The Future of Mfg Conference:
Cindy Estrada, VP UAW says working with suppliers to help? UAW working on culture change, giving workers more voice at the suppliers? Working with Dana post-bankruptcy, and Lear...What does culture change really mean? Doesn't like Charter Schools? doesn't want to "gut the Public Schools" - a Charter School IS a public school - having founded one - at HALF the cost and more flexibility.
CEO Novartis Joseph Jimenez, talking about mfg job loss? 1300/week? So why not become The Service Economy predicted in the 90s? Because it won't work - No R & D, no stimulation, no innovation, and higher wages in mfg compared to service industry. Novartis the leader in innovation/R&D funding! MIT LGO Conf "The Future of Mfg-
MIT Pres Hockfield on innovation in mfg, leading gov. initiatives - mfg is more glamorous already!
dynamite - mfg lives say execs from GM, Healthland Robotics, Amgen, J & J, SpiritAero, Cat, more. So where's the future of mfg coming from? IT! And it's coming back to The Americas! Mfg/supply chain expert David Simchi-Levi says "it's time to reconsider supply chain and logistics costs." MORE TO COME, WATCH BLUE HERON/TWITTER/LINKEDIN
***