Alcatel

Simultaneous Equations Cost Models

Alcatel (work was with their DSC Communications acquisition) needed to increase its capacity to meet large contracts for PCBs but it did not want to invest in additional factory lines.  Instead the goal was to increase throughput on existing production lines by improving quality.  The first look at one of their PCB lines revealed 17 inspectors and defects laying in piles.  We can all laugh about it now but we actually found stacks of missing Quality Reports under a desk to level it.  The goal was pretty straightforward once we saw the quality problems. It was to improve processes, improve maintenance and training and improve the design process so designers could estimate the downstream costs of specific design features in the design process.   

Ample

Electric Vehicle SCM Development

Ample is the #2 world leader in battery swapping bay manufacturing, but #1 in being the only one to develop a standardized battery that can be used in all vehicles.   Ample manufactures standardized electric vehicle industry batteries that can be used in many EV vehicles after the vehicle's original OEM battery is removed and the vehicle is fitted with a proprietary Ample undercarriage that can house their standard batteries and work with their battery swapping bays.  The work done for Ample was development of their Supply Chain.  Assessment was conducted on ten World-Class Management Step Charts and 108 projects for improvement were identified ranging from creating a Portfolio of Contract Types (they previously used Fixed Firm Price for 99% of procurements) to Dual Sourcing strategies to diversify and reduce risk on Chinese manufacturers.  Contact Dr. Starling for more information and the EV Industry World-Class Best Practices model.

Alliance Pipeline

Facilities & Flow Process Analyses

The Alliance Pipeline system consists of 2,391-mile integrated Canadian and U.S. natural gas transmission pipeline system, delivering rich natural gas from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin and the Willis​ton Basin to the Chicago market hub. The system had been in commercial service since December 2000 but increases in flow capacity and high energy gases were about to be added in 2016 to their transmission and that is where we come in.  Our software could calculate the gas compositions more accurately given only C6+ chromatographs.  With our calculations, Alliance knew it could safely transport specific volumes of the gases.  Safety is very important with explosive gases and the potential of destroying values lines, compressors, and other facilities. 

AT&T

70 Supply Chain Workshops + CSR

AT&T was acquiring several smaller telecommunications companies and needed a consistent training and consulting program for its logistics, warehousing, procurement, and supply chain professionals.  It just so happened we were already consulting and providing seminars on a variety of supply chain topics to their San Leandro Warehouse Facility group.  The program that had 10 courses in it with hands on visits to facilities to discuss improvement ideas was expanded out to 6 more cities of Chicago, Detroit, South Bend, Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles.

Another project with AT&T was development of the CSR model that is now a Program within the Roadmaps Institute.  CSR is the acronym for Corporate Social Responsibility.   AT&T had interest in developing diversity supplier, becoming better at outreach, and working towards more sustainable solutions, so we put together three World Class Management Step Charts for Diversity, Outreach, and Sustainability.  The model was first presented at a conference in San Francisco and subsequently at the former Pacific Bell Headquarters now part of AT&T.   

Boeing

Gap Analyses Lead to Improvements

Roadmaps principals have had a strong relationship with Boeing over the years.   Dr. Starling even took 42 student for a visit with managers at the Boeing - Long Beach facility in Southern California.   Managers in different divisions have utilized the World-Class Management Step Charts for identifying areas of improvement and measuring progress.  Boeing's World-Class Management Step Chart data is rolled up anonymously  into the Aerospace Industry Business Capability Index at the Roadmaps Institute along with data from 31 other Aerospace Industry companies.  Online workshops were held, the last one had 9 PhDs from Boeing discussing best practices. 

Caterpillar

Flexible Manufacturing and Feature Based Costing

Work with Caterpillar dates back as early as 1994 when Dr.  Starling and Dr.  Therani of Carnegie-Mellon University actually moved to Decatur, Illinois for a 6 month project to improve Cat's Flexible Manufacturing Systems that were cost sinkholes at the time.   Dr. Starling gathered data on the processes and identified wasteful activities.  In doing so, the causes were traced back largely to the Design Process.  Dr. Therani and Dr. Starling decided with Cat management to develop a Artificial Intelligence interface for designers of piece parts to estimate the Costs of Quality from a Life Cycle Costing approach.  The work was initially published as "Feature Based Costing AI Prototype at Caterpillar." Internal Caterpillar publication in conjunction with Carnegie-Mellon University.  Later work with Caterpillar would be in San Diego where Dr. Starling worked with Solar Turbines, a Caterpillar Division, to improve their processes.

Chevron

Natural Gas Measurement Software Systems

Although the core of what Roadmaps Consulting does centers around manufacturing organizations and organizations with complex supply chains, we are capable of writing software programs that address needs of customers.  

Chevron Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation. Chevron is engaged in every aspect of the oil, natural gas, and geothermal energy industries, including hydrocarbon exploration and production; refining, marketing and transport; chemicals manufacturing and sales; and power generation.  In the transport of oil and gas Chevron needs software that accurately measures their flows and it needs the software on the linked information systems and available to operators in the field.  We developed software for both of these needs.

Clorox

Product Container Supply Chain Efficacy Analysis

Focus was on optimization of the design of product containers, transport, warehousing in the supply chain.  Managers consulted with me on developing mathematical models and a artificial intelligence based optimization design tool with the goal of mitigating costs before a design, ie new product, is produced.   

Honeywell

Software for Measuring Natural Gas Flows

Co-developed C Code with American Gas Association standards and proprietary software embedded for Honeywell's products sold world wide. The software was implemented as firmware for use in control and electronic flow measurement devices.   The code can also be implemented on a server, mainframe, and PC levels with various operating systems.  The code is the most accurate software in the world given the standards involved.

Intuit

Intuit Inc. is an American business and financial software company that develops and sells financial, accounting, and tax preparation software and related services for small businesses, accountants, and individuals.   So it makes sense that Intuit has interest in understanding and measuring costs.    A Vice-President of Intuit, Scott Beth, had shown interest in developing models for the Total Cost of Ownership and Life Cycle Costing, not necessarily for Intuit, but as a means to advocate better ways of measuring costs in companies that Intuit works  with as customers.  Scott worked with Dr. Starling on documenting best practices, barriers and solutions to measuring Total Cost of Ownership and Life Cycle Costs accurately.  The conclusions were summarized in a white paper titled, “Measuring TCO Across the Supply Chain at Intuit." 

JMC (Petroskills)

Process Optimization and Development

JMC was a small company located in Norman, Oklahoma.   They were considered the top company in the world in midstream and downstream training in the Oil and Gas Industry.  ‘Upstream’ is about extracting oil and natural gas from the ground.   ‘Midstream’ is about safely moving oil and gas. ‘Downstream’ is converting oil and gas resources into the fuels and finished products.

After presentation of the World-Class Process Management Step Chart upper management decided to have us assist in a one year effort documenting and improving all of the their over 180 processes.   The documentation of the processes was perfectly timed as the #1 training company in the Oil and Gas Industry for downstream training was interested in buying JMC.  Once Petroskills saw the documented processes, they knew with great clarity exactly what they were buying and the deal was done! 

Kaucuk

Quality Management in Czech Republic

The project was through the Czechoslovak Management Center (CMC) outside of Prague.  Focused on improvements to the management of quality at Kaucuk, a Czech Republic manufacturer of liquid fuels, plastics, and rubber.  Worked with Dr. Dagmar Gluckaufova of CMC and Dr. Pandu Tadikamalla of The University of Pittsburgh.

LG Corporation

Supply Chain Consulting in South Korea

Prior to Dr. Starling's gender affirmation, she was hired to come to South Korea to work with LG supply chain managers improve their capabilities.   LG specifically wanted to evaluate themselves on several of the World-Class Management Step Charts and discuss ideas for improvement based on the gaps.  As is often the case, even the best companies in the world find ways to improve with the step charts.   An added bonus for Dr. Starling was they also helped improve the step charts with some new best practices.  Which brings up a salient point.  The World-Class Management Step Charts do not vary much year to year in content but the are living documents that change as new best practices become known.

Louisiana-Pacific

SCM Workshops with Management Step Charts

LP is an American building materials manufacturer is the world's largest producer of strand board or OSB and also manufactures engineered wood building products.  LP products are sold to builders and homeowners through building materials distributors and dealers and retail home centers.  In the LP Supply Chain, there were 24 mills including 15 in the United States, and 9 in foreign countries.  LP sent senior SCM managers to San Diego to meet with Dr. Starling to review their best practices and develop plans for improving operations based on gaps discovered in several select World-Class Management Step Charts.

Montefiore Hospital

Simulations of Operating Rooms to Improve Scheduling and Throughput

Dr. Brian Williams approached Dr. Starling about issues with uncertainty in  scheduling operating rooms at  Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh.    After some discussion of the problems, the decision was made to create simulation models for the operating rooms to account better for uncertainty.   Using the process flow documentation and simulation modelling, layouts of the operating room areas was modified for improved flows and scheduling resulting in higher throughput, less wasted time of physicians and staff, and improved outcomes.  The work was published  as "Optimization of Anesthesia Staffing Using Simulation Modeling," in The American Journal of Anesthesiology.

Raytheon

DR2IVE Program Across Six Divisions

At Raytheon Dr. Starling was seen as a professor. consultant, facilitator, and a Six Sigma Master Blackbelt in their ISC-Six Sigma Program. This was the largest consulting and teaching program Dr. Starling has ever been a part of with teaching ISC-Six Sigma to 350+ mid-level managers from all of Raytheon's divisions across three continents.   In the consulting, Raytheon was measured in all of their divisions (and invited chain members such as the USAF) using ten Aerospace Industry step charts.   From the projects, Raytheon could develop Robust Roadmaps to achieve unprecedented improvements to the bottom line.  Over 7,000 projects were in Raytheon's Six Sigma program at the time.

Sopraffino

Unprofitable Business Made Profitable

Sopraffino had a problem.  They weren't covering their expenses.  After some discussions with the owners, it was determined if they could bypass wholesalers in their supply chain then they could increase their profits on the flowers they sold by about 15%, which put them into the profitable zone.  Sometimes solutions are easy and the company simply never considered a simple idea.  A bonus was the owners had to send people on a regular basis to the San Francisco Flower Market to buy from the wholesalers that were making the profits.  Instead, suppliers just drop shipped the flowers and plants directly to Sopraffino.  The inventory lasted longer too since it was a couple days fresher!

Spolana

Petrochemical Products Quality in Czech Republic

Focused on improvements to the management of quality at Spolana, a manufacturer of petrochemical based products, such as PVC.  Worked with Dr. Dagmar Gluckaufova and Dr. Pandu Tadikamalla.  

Thermal Industries

Process Documentation, Value Analysis and Expert System for Operator Decisions

Pittsburgh-area Thermal Industries invented and manufactured the first vinyl replacement window.   A problem they had for their extrusion processes was maintaining qualified operators running the lines.   An experienced operator had higher quality and more throughput than less experienced operators of the extrusion processes and upper management wanted to know why.  After isolating a obvious issue with data of using regrind versus virgin vinyl bead in the intake hoppers, we set to the task of documenting what the experienced operators did that gave them the better performance.  Then once we discovered the rules by which the experienced operators made their decisions, we coded the rules into an Expert System.  With the Expert System, new operators would then get suggestions for tweaking their settings based on key parameters as inputs. 

TRACO

Processes Analyzed and Development of Models to Estimate Costs of Quality and Life Cycle Costs

TRACO is most famous for providing the windows for the Statue of Liberty, hence their logo.  This was a pretty well run factory that only needed tweaking of some processes.  Upper management decided to focus our efforts on measuring the Costs of Quality and Life Cycle Costs.   We developed models for TRACO that resulted in  four publications as follows: "Case Study: Strategic Costs of Quality Management at TRACO,"  “Understanding Supplier Problems in Accurate Measurement of the Costs of Quality,” published in The Purchasing Pipeline, a publication by the National Association of Purchasing Management,  “Feature Based Proactive Estimation of Producer's Life Cycle Costs,”  “Pitfalls of Measuring the Costs of Quality,” both published in The 1999 Western Decision Sciences Conference Proceedings.  Dissertation titled "Feature Based Proactive Estimation of Product Life Cycle Costs."

United States Air Force

Workshops, Presentations, Step Charts and More

Roadmaps has had several interactions with the US Air Force.  First being workshops directly related to Supply Chain Management.  Second, USAF was the only Customer of Raytheon participating in Raytheon's Integrated Supply Chain Six Sigma Program.   In work with Raytheon, the USAF were exposed to the ten Aerospace Industry step charts.  The third interaction was in development of the L2G - Lean to Green Program .  The L2G Program has three World-Class Management Step Charts in it with the featured one being Lean and the other two being Sustainability and Process.   The USAF was also active with NACFAM, National Council for Advanced Manufacturing, with which Dr. Starling served on a special NACFAM think-tank in Washington, DC that met with Congress and White House officials during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars.

Wente Winery

Process Simulations Run to Increase Capacity

Wente Winery wasa project that was more a  love of good wine than work.  We reviewed their processes from grape to customers in an effort to better manage their peak season capacities better.  While we would have liked to have done more, such a demand balancing, we did create and run simulations to determine bottlenecks and then provided Wente with a plan for the equipment they would need to resolve the bottlenecks and gain needed capacity.

Side Story: During the project we never met an owner of the Winery; however, on a trip to Hong Kong to teach MBA students, Dr. Starling ran into by chance Karl Wente in an elevator in The Peninsula Hotel. The elevator was a special one that only went to the top floor where a nightclub called Felix's was located.  After discovering who each other were, Karl bought drinks the rest of the night.  Not one drop of wine though!