The Future of Transportation: 2 wheeled and un-wheeled

A key driver in operations and supply chain management is transportation.  Here are two innovations — one will make it to market soon; the other is probably farther out:

1. Lit Motors’ C1 two wheeler:

This Is the Gyro-Stabilized, Two-Wheeled Future of Transportation

At first sight, I was thinking this looks like the BMW C1, which is a motorcycle with a roof that I’ve seen on the streets of Europe since the early 2000:

While the The Lit Motors’ protoype has the same name (C1 — I don’t know what the connection is), it is very different in two aspects: 1) it is fully electric and, more interestingly, 2) it is gyro-stabilized.  The two gyroscopes keep the C1 constantly upright.  “That means it stays standing while stopped and can pirouette through traffic like the best from Honda, Yamaha and Ducati. How much force would it take to knock the C1 on its side? According to Lit, a small elephant would have to hit it broadside to put the C1 on the ground.”   Now that is cool! And this is an actual prototype so it may make it to market, which is not so clear about the second transportation innovation:

2. Volkswagen Levitating Car

This is a “concept car” that uses magnetic levitation (similar to the high speed train I rode to the Shangai airport–we clocked 448kph).  I have no idea how close this is to actual feasibility, but it surely would be the coolest car around!

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Executive Operations Experience: From Strategy to Execution

For once we are not reporting on external content but on our own: I am excited to announce a totally new approach to executive learning and education on operations. Co-author and co-blogger Gad Allon and I have been working with our friends at McKinsey & Company to design the Executive Operations Experience: From Strategy to Execution.

A new collaboration between the Kellogg School of Management and McKinsey & Company.

Operations executives who are eager to stay current, hone their skills and broaden their networks, take note! In an exciting cooperative venture,  the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, and McKinsey & Company will be offering a first-of-its-kind, experiential learning program starting in the fall of this year. Four, three-day sessions taking place at McKinsey’s model factories throughout Europe will provide a curriculum that covers all operational functions, jointly taught by both academics and consultants. Learn if the new 2013 program might be right for you here.

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Making American Apparel in America

When you think of the retailer American Apparel, you may first think of racy advertising or a CEO prone to being served with sexual harassment suits. (My mind, of course, goes immediately to a classic Onion piece that combines both of these.) What you may not know is that American Apparel’s apparel is actually made in America. Just how they go about doing that is the subject of a recent LA Times piece (American Apparel fights the ‘made in America’ fight. For how long?, Jun 3).

The company’s seven-story factory, a former Southern Pacific Railway freight depot, is the biggest garment-making facility in the U.S., according to an industry trade group. Here, 4,500 workers staggered over two shifts cut, sew, fold, box and ship clothes to the company’s 253 stores and other clothiers worldwide. …

In addition to the two large buildings downtown, the company owns four smaller manufacturing operations in Southern California. Fabric for the company’s trademark cotton T-shirts, which come in 52 colors, is knit and dyed in those facilities before getting trucked downtown for sewing.

So what steps do they take to make manufacturing T-shirts in the US viable?

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Children’s Memorial & the logistics of moving a hospital

So have you ever had a hard time getting a kid into the car? You ready to go, you’re running late and someone is just being fussy, arching their back, and refusing to be a good cooperator. That’s nothing compared to what Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital is up against. They are getting ready to move into a new facility and have to manage the logistics of getting all of their patients from Point A to Point B (Patients, prep work crucial in move of Children’s Hospital, Chicago Tribune, May 30).

During the course of a single Saturday, Children’s Memorial Hospital will move out of its 131-year-old home, most of it spent at Lincoln and Fullerton avenues, and into the new, $855 million Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in the Streeterville neighborhood.

The 31/2 -mile journey has taken more than three years to choreograph and $30 million to plan and execute.

As many as 200 children, from premature infants to teenagers, including dozens in intensive care, need to be moved, one by one, most with their own ambulance and medical team.

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