Efficient Factory

We should be getting to a major milestone soon. He 787 will be airborne for the first time very soon. It’s coming up

The 787 as seen on 070807

 on two years since Sunday, July 8^th, 2007 or 7-8-7; the date that the new 787 Dreamliner rolled out in Everett Washington to much fanfare and a slick video production. Uunfortunately the cabin was bare inside. I just happened to see it first hand months later in November, on a plant tour of the Everet Faciltiy. Airplane number 1 was dusty and dirty and in various states of unassembly.

It’s true they missed initial launch date by a long shot but in their defense, Boeing had two important innovations to roll out. First, the product; this is the largest production composite structure ever made. The carbon fiber fuselage and wings makes the entire aircraft much lighter and 20% more fuel-efficient. It was a big task from an engineering and production standpoint. They are clearly charting new ground.

The second major innovation is the method of manufacture. Boeing decided to create an extended supply chain for finished major components of the airplane. It outsourced the manufacture of these components bringing them together in Everett Washington. Boeing is now primarily the designer and assembler of the finished product, leaving the parts manufacturing and subassemblies to others for the first time in aviation history.

Many issues with the manufacturing strategy cropped up over the last couple of years. Yes, there was a machinists stike early on but production delays were largely attributed to confusion and miscommunication from the supply chain. Information about the parts and information about the process did not always correlate. The status of readiness of parts wasn’t available or was often in the wrong format. The expense incurred of solving the problems is immense. Just consider the costs of lost revenue of waiting for two years for the most popular airplane in history. The presales figures have been very impressive having orders for over 850 new 787 jetliners.

The readiness of the supply chain and syndicate that Boeing set up are what many consider the root of the delay. If information was in the same format and standards were applied, much of the confusion could have been avoided. It’s clear that the information about the process and product were indistinguishable to Boeings problems.

The learning curve may be long, but Boeing is coming to the end of it, successfully.

Here are some promotional videos and multimedia about the 787 from www.newairplane.com

Remember the classic 1970’s books about declining quality in the car industry? The Lemon-Aid series of car manuals, have been issued annually since the 1970s. The quality crisis of the lemon was beaten. North American cars consistently rank as high or higher than the imports in quality. But now there is another crisis on our hands. So what does manufacturing do now in the 2000’s? Two of the big three are in bankruptcy. It seems as thought he auto industry has had a pretty good run, The Model T rolled out of Detroit starting in 1908 and by 1927 Ford had built over 15 million.   The 20^th century was definitely the century of the automobile and succeeded in driving the growth of the US economy and providing THE base for manufacturing

So where do we go now? How is manufacturing going to change now that these mighty two have fallen? In this age, it seems that “bigness” is not going to be a successful attribute anymore. The too big to fail argument is been hit a number of times in the last year. The quick, flexible, and the nimble are going to be the winners in the future. The companies of the future are the ones investing in the systems to adapt quickly. It’s a big change from what has traditionally driven industry.

Many think the most important trend in manufacturing is going to be the information about the product and process. Not just the information but also how relevant it is from the time it’s collected to the time it’s put to use. Technologies today are getting closer to that point but still factories are clusters of disparate information that don’t correlate. Different protocols for sending and receiving information and different data formats make the issue difficult. Traditionally a control issue is solved with a unique solution. Typically, a solution to a problem is seen as an engineered solution, and implemented as a single solution, for a single instance of a problem.

The effective use of information to take action rapidly is equally as important. Charts, graphs, and dashboards are nice to have but the killer applications of the future will combine these elements into the process seamlessly. They’ll do so by closed loop adaptive feedback mechanisms. It’s happening now but there is long way to go, and much value to be created in the process. Last year, in Information Week magazine, GM (A healthier GM than exists today) was completing an upgrade to their IT across all plants. In this article they were only thinking about some of the potential new technologies like Zigbee and Bluetooth. At least GM does realize that there is going to be plenty more adoption of new technology.

You can read it here

The Chryslers and GM’s, and even the Fords and Toyotas are going to be smaller and more nimble. Looking at the future and making a prediction is tough. The one thing that’s clear is that these events of the last year brought on a dramatic change. We are at the crossroads now. With some insight, the path taken will lead to prosperity. Manufacturing has to make the right investments to ensure prosperity.

If you give it away, they will come. That’s what they have been doing with MySQL for over ten years now and its success is measured as being the second most downloaded application, after the Firefox browser. But how do they make money?

A week or so ago I sat down with a few other techies interested in learning more about open source. Sun Microsystems provided the venue. They were recently gobbled up by Oracle, and last year Sun gobbled up MySQL. Now Oracle owns a popular open source application that competes with it’s flagship database product.

The question in lots of minds  is what will happen to this great resource now that a company that’s famous for retiring acquired products in favor of its own. Cutting to the chase, it’s really too soon to tell, but there is an interesting wrinkle happening.

The free version of My SQL is every bit as robust as the paid version. It’s not “cripple ware” that lets you use it for a time period before it shuts off or provides limited functionality – it’s the same source code for you to use on your own. That’s the wrinkle; you’re on your own. However, in the interconnected world of today the user community of others “on their own” provide the support.

We learned that some very large companies rely on it as their main database. Facebook uses it, and up untill last year they didn’t pay a dime. With the nature of these companies relying on this free application created an interesting dynamic. They want to be sure that MySQL stays around for the long haul. Understanding that they need to support them, they’ve come to a point that they cant ‘t afford not to pay them. MySQL is too important to die. When a company is profitable, that’s when they are all too happy to begin paying for direct company support or customization.mOst issues can be solved by the users community but companies relying on MySQL go to the fron to f the line.

It’s a nice win-win-win scenario; a win for the fledgling startup; a win for MySQL; and a win for the companies that use it.