Data from the factory floor

It is tempting to label everything involving data as big data these days as if the qualifier makes the topic inherently sexier. The Wall Street Journal is guilty of this in recent headline on “manufacturing execution systems” (How Many Turns in a Screw? Big Data Knows, May 15). While the headline may be hyperbole, the basic idea of these systems is pretty cool.

Raytheon is one of many manufacturers installing more sophisticated, automated systems to gather and analyze factory-floor data. The company uses software known as manufacturing execution systems, or MES, which has been around since the 1980s. Semiconductor and other high-tech companies were early adopters, but now “others are catching up,” says Tom Comstock, an executive vice president at Apriso Corp., one of the suppliers of this software. …

Manufacturers are looking harder at data partly because of increasing pressure from customers to eliminate defects and from shareholders to squeeze out more costs. Regulators are also demanding more data collection to trace safety problems. The cost of computers, scanners and other hardware has also come down, and technology for storing and moving data has improved.

At the same time, factory equipment has “got smarter,” says Mike Lackey, a vice president at SAP. The newest equipment comes with computerized controls that make it easier to collect data and share it with the rest of the company or suppliers.

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Fallen Arches: Fixing service at McDonald’s

What counts as good service at a fast food restaurant? Speed obviously matters but what about staff interactions? No expects a quick service restaurant to have a Zagat’s rating (although some Chicago hot dog stands are graded) but can fast food service slip so much that customers notice?

Apparently the answer is yes, and furthermore McDonald’s hasn’t been doing so well in delivering service (McDonald’s Tackles Repair of ‘Broken’ Service, Apr 10).

But achieving speed and friendliness of service across the chain has been a particularly elusive goal, at least in part because about 90% of McDonald’s restaurants in the U.S. are owned by independent operators.

In QSR Magazine’s annual Drive-Thru Study, the only comprehensive industry comparison of customer service at fast-food chains, other restaurants have consistently outperformed McDonald’s in those areas. In last year’s study, the average service time at the McDonald’s drive-through studied was 188.83 seconds, compared with 129.75 for industry leader Wendy’s Co.  Chick-fil-A had the top friendliness ratings. Out of the seven major chains in the study, McDonald’s was second to last in the “very friendly” ranking, just above Burger King.

So what are the root causes of the problem and what can they do about it?

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The Unbearable Lightness of Lululemon Yoga Pants

So Lululemon has a problem with its yoga pants. It is of the I-see-England-I-see-France variety (Lululemon Yoga Pants Pulled From Stores for ‘Sheerness’, Wall Street Journal, March 19).

The yoga-apparel retailer’s shares tumbled late Monday after saying it has pulled some of its popular pants from stores, after a mistake by a supplier left the pants too see-through. …

“The ingredients, weight and longevity qualities of the pants remain the same but the coverage does not, resulting in a level of sheerness in some of our women’s black Luon bottoms that falls short of our very high standards,” Lululemon said in a release.

Lululemon said Monday it has used the same manufacturing supplier on key fabrics since 2004 and is working to understand what happened.

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Managing quality and variety at Lego

When I was a kid, I loved Legos. So I was, of course, pleased when my kids started playing with them. In the last year or so, my kids have outgrown them. And while having all the Legos put away makes it a little safer to walk barefoot across the family room, it does make me a litte sad. Which is why, I guess, I have a soft spot for stories about Legos.

Like, for example, a BBC story asking just how many Legos can you stack on top of each other (How tall can a Lego tower get?, Dec 3). Turns out, you can make a pretty tall tower.

Ian Johnston and the team do two more tests to be sure we hadn’t just happened upon the strongest Lego brick in existence. And in fact they were impressed at the consistency of Lego manufacture.

The average maximum force the bricks can stand is 4,240N. That’s equivalent to a mass of 432kg (950lbs). If you divide that by the mass of a single brick, which is 1.152g, then you get the grand total of bricks a single piece of Lego could support: 375,000.

So, 375,000 bricks towering 3.5km (2.17 miles) high is what it would take to break a Lego brick.

Here’s a graphic to help visualize 375,000 Lego bricks.

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Good news for better air travelers: More on-time flights

For those heading to an airport for the Thanksgiving holiday, the New York Times (Airlines’ On-Time Performance Rises, Nov 21) has some good news: More flights are leaving on time!

There are, of course, some devils in the details behind these aggregate numbers. Performance can vary by month simply because of weather (apparently August and January are the worst) and the numbers above do not reflect commuter airlines affiliated with major carriers (so going home to a small regional airport may be more touch and go). Also, as the graph makes clear, it sucks to be a major airline that like United goes through multiple computer glitches in a year.

So how have the airlines brought up their performance? By focusing on the processes needed to get planes out.

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It’s election day. Do you know if your ballot is secure?

Chicago Public Radio has a fun series of reports titled Curious City. The premise of the series is that listeners submit Chicago-related questions (e.g., what’s with 16 inch softballs?) and they go out to find the answer. Some of their questions have an operational bent, although “how do they clean The Bean?” or “how do the reversible express lanes on the Kennedy work?” have seemed a little too Chicago-centric to write about here.

But this past week they hit on a question that has relevance across the country: What are elections authorities doing to protect voting?

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Monitoring quality via online reviews

Pretty much every e-commerce site now allows customers to express their opinion about products. Such reviews can certainly be helpful to other customers, but how do firms use the feedback? According to the Wall Street Journal, some firms are now using the reviews to monitor for quality problems (Firms Take Online Reviews to Heart, Jul 29).

L.L. Bean Inc. noticed earlier this year that one of its top-selling products, Supima Cotton Fitted Sheets, was being slammed in online customer reviews.

The company, which pulled the sheets from its website, found that a wrinkle-resistance treatment mistakenly added by a contractor was causing the cotton fabric to unravel. It offered new sheets to the 6,300 customers who had purchased the set and destroyed the rest of the faulty batch.

“Before, it would have taken us months and months to figure out if something was wrong with the product through returns, if we ever would have known at all,” said Steve Fuller, L.L. Bean’s chief marketing officer.

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Lemons are disappearing from the auto industry

My kids have had the good fortune of never riding in a really bad car. Even the used Carolla we owned years ago was very reliable. My parents worked through their share of crappy cars from the Vega with an unreliable engine block to the Fury III that was prone to stalling just as it was hitting the entrance ramp to the highway. But as NPR reports, my kids may never know a true lemon (U.S. Automakers Aim To Eliminate Lemons, Apr 3).

[Reporter TRACY] SAMILTON: The trucks built in this Detroit factory are getting high marks from outside rating groups. But a similar turnaround is happening pretty much everywhere, with just about every car company. Quality, once largely the domain of Toyota and Honda, is now simply the price of entry.

Jesse Toprak is an analyst with TrueCar.com.

JESSE TOPRAK: So you go to any dealership today, buy any new car in the U.S. dealerships, you’re not going to get a clunker that’s going to fall apart on you.

SAMILTON: Toprak says quality has been rising for at least 20 years, and the gap between the best and worst is shrinking.

The claim about the convergence in the quality of US and import brands is shown by this graph of the well-known J.D. Power study of initial vehicle quality:

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Better emergency rooms

Hospitals present a host of operational challenges. Patients arrive with a variety of ailments and the mix of work changes by the day or even by the hour. Resources are always limited and time can be of the essence. This is especially true in the emergency room. Sure there are challenges up in, say, the obstetrics ward, but they can at least keep non-obstetric cases out of the ward. The ER, however, has to take all comers and decisions have to be made quickly. Perhaps, then it is not surprising that ERs are a major source of malpractice suits (Hospitals Overhaul ERs to Reduce Mistakes, May 10, Wall Street Journal).

Often chaotic and overcrowded, with scant data available about new patients, the emergency room is among the top hospital departments responsible for malpractice suits—and diagnostic errors account for 37% to 55% of cases in studies of closed claims. The average payments and legal expenses for ER cases have more than doubled over the past two decades, according to the Physician Insurers Association of America, a nonprofit trade association whose members cover about 60% of emergency physicians.

Insurance broker Aon Corp. estimates malpractice suits arising from emergency-room incidents in 2009 alone will cost hospitals $1 billion.

Here’s a the article’s author discusses some of her finding and how hospitals are trying to reduce the number of errors.

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Will Google ever be as reliable as Ma Bell?

So one of the challenges in managing services is managing quality. When you can’t touch something, it’s hard to know whether you have gotten it right. Of course, there are some exceptions in which measuring quality is pretty straightforward. The easiest examples are settings in which “quality” maps seamlessly to reliability. When I turned on my TV, I expect that both my electricity and cable providers will deliver. When I pick up my land line phone, I expect a dial tone. As the New York Times reports (99.999% Reliable? Don’t Hold Your Breath, Jan 9), traditional phone providers are very good at being highly reliable:

AT&T’s dial tone set the all-time standard for reliability. It was engineered so that 99.999 percent of the time, you could successfully make a phone call. Five 9s. That works out to being available all but 5.26 minutes a year.

Against that backdrop, consider the recent troubles that Hotmail and Skype have had making sure their “utilities” continue to run. Is it reasonable to expect that modern communication and information technology will ever be as reliable as Ma Bell? Maybe not…

As more and more Web services companies acquire years of experience, we’ll see more consistent reliability — it’s just a matter of time and learning. Attaining Four-9s availability will become routine. That means available all but 52.56 minutes a year.

As for moving to 99.999, well, that may never come. “We don’t believe Five 9s is attainable in a commercial service, if measured correctly,” says Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at Google. The company’s goal for its major services is Four 9s.

Google’s search service almost reaches Five 9s every year, Mr. Hölzle says. By its very nature, it is relatively easy to provide uninterrupted availability for search. There are many redundant copies of Google’s indexes of the Web, and they are spread across many data centers. A Web search does not require constant updating of a user’s personal information in one place and then instantly creating identical copies at other data centers.

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