Quietly Re-Thinking Out Loud

As part of the continuing Theory of Constraints Learning Process and the Lean Journey my companies and the companies I consult with are on, I came across another interesting (PDF) article as part of some research I was on. The article that I found dusted off recollections of a topic that appeared in the Journal of Light Construction Business Strategies forum last winter entitled Is Our Industry Antiquated?

The contractor who started the topic off first wrote:

Just watched a TLC program about the largest Cruise Liner ever made, Voyager of the Sea. From start to finish is was completed in two years. 1020′ long (3 + football fields in length) , 157′ beam, and 214′ high (20 - 25 decks ?), and it’s not the longest ship either; an oil tanker is about 1600′ long, which is more than 5 football fields in length. And this cruise ship is like a hundred houses in one.

My point, and I guess question, is if such a ship with the tremendous challenges to build it, yet accomplishing that task is only 2 years is incredible compared to the result of a huge high end house that would take us two years. Seems what we do is nothing compared to what’s being done in ship yards as far as efficiency of resources.

Comments?

Royal Caribbean Cruises - Voyager of the Seas

For the most part I thought the responses from other contractors to the topic were really either lists of excuses as to why we can’t do that in our industry:

"Yeah Sonny, but does their client keep changing the color of the ship? or the locations of the windows? or the cabinetry?") or explantions as to

Or explanations as to why they were able to accomplish such a tremendous production effort because they had the extra money to spend on it!!

"Am I antiquated with regards to that? You betcha. Does it cost my bottom line? Nope. We all have room for improvment in just about anything we build. Is that the point you’re trying to get across? Could I better keep track of inventory? Sure, by hiring someone like the shipyards do just to do that all day. Can I keep the men better supplied and ahead of the game at all times? Sure, I just need someone to oversee that on a full time basis. Can I afford these luxuries like the union ship yard can? No way. Do I have a crew of tool men keeping track of who needs what and keeping all the tools in repair at all times. Nope. The ship yard does. They can afford it."

Wow talk about really not seeing the forest through the trees!

However in defense of some of some of my fellow contractors there are some out there who I think either "get it" or are beginning to "get it".

Builder Allan Edwards wrote:

"If 80% of the projects are coming in behind schedule, then I would say that’s the norm. Isn’t’t insanity described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Seriously, scheduling is something we should give more attention to. "

And contractor Rick Westmoreland wrote:

"Of course, 80% of the schedules could be unrealistic to begin with."

And Estimating Consultant Bob Kovacs wrote:

"The benefits of fast-track are incredible if it’s done correctly."

Looking back at that topic I was surprised to notice that I never said what I really wanted say there in response to that "They can afford it." comment was essentially what Bob Kovacs was getting at in that the Because the work is well designed thought out and is done in a continuous FLOW process it is by far LESS EXPENSIVE! It’s saving money! The truth is we can’t afford not to do what they are doing!

We (our industry as a whole) have to stop making excuses as to why we can’t innovate and improve if we are ever going to fully realize the potential for achieving and harnessing greater profits.

Well, getting back to where I started the PDF article I discovered today is entitled TOC in a Commercial Shipyard by Daniel P. Walsh from the VectorStrategies.com website. Well worth reading.

by: admin

I’ve neglected my blogging here for the past few months as I’ve been getting down and dirty working and finishing off a bunch of project I have long neglected or haven’t worked diligently or sincerely on. In other words I been taking what I’ve leaned from from all these blogs and actually practicing what they (and I) preach.

The other day when a friend Bob Kovacs mentioned that he was still waiting to hear from me about the latest version of my 360 Trade Contractor Estimating software I replied "I’ve been busy programming and entering and organizing data so that why I’ve been a little out of touch, I’ve been getting some good feedback from some of my beta testers and both responding to their questions and making changes and adjustments takes up a whale of time. Also it’s now playoff time for Major League Baseball so that takes up time too. "

It’s the ‘it’s MLB Playoff time” excuse that I find interesting and ironic especially right now. I’m a a serious lifetime Yankee fan so as you might imagine with the Yanks tied 1-1 in the series right now and things looking up I’m enjoying this playoff season. I should mention that while I am a Yankee fan I am perhaps just as much a Baseball fan period so this whole postseason has been particularly interesting and exciting.

Reading the info box on the right you might notice that one of my favorite blogs is Jeff Angus’ Management by Baseball and that’s not just because it’s about baseball. I think there is an incredible amount of information regarding management and life to be learned from baseball and while there is tons of good stuff in MBB it’s Joe Ely’s Learning About Lean that had the big apropos lesson for me and what I been doing recently. See Finishing the Task Sunday, October 19, 2003 Posted 3:46 PM.

Well I’d love to talk about it more right now but I do have other things I need to get back to finishing.

by: admin

From and entry I made in the discussion forums on this site to Bill Amaya topic "What is our CCR?"

Hey Bill, it’s great to hear your voice again in here

Reading where you said:"The challenge and my dilemma comes when I take a broader look at my company and try to find the one thing that is setting the pace or pinching the cash flow. In fact I am having a hard time even categorizing what to look at." Just clobbered me with a lesson that maybe I’ve always subconsciously known but didn’t really understand the significance or power of until this year.

As I think I told you I lucked out and managed to get a consulting gig working with another company in another industry (aerospace) on "business process improvement" that I took as an opportunity to see if what I knew and was learning about TOC would work for others. What clobbered me was that working on another company’s problems and processes helped me see my own companies’ processes in a whole new light. Instead of seeing my own companies’ just from the inside-out position I was now seeing things from the out-side in that I hadn’t ever seen before.

What might work for you (and perhaps anyone) in terms of really developing your TOC techniques and tools is for you to find another different kind of company and work with them to help them understand their processes better and then in the spirit of quid pro quo have the leader of that company work with you on yours. That way you both get the benefit of having a detached third party looking critically at your operation and you’ll perhaps start to find that you can shift your own thinking and point of view back and forth from insider to outsider at times too.

I think there is a tendency when we are working within our own company’s to zero in problems or hunches that we have just developed a prejudice about (regardless of whether it a positive or negative prejudice). You can’t and shouldn’t ignore those hunches but you have to be very careful that you don’t become infatuated with them too.

"Our niche is to provide fabrication as well as installation of all of the architectual wood work that is just to difficult for the on site carpenters to perform and the cabinet shops don’t want to or simply can’t." Great description! Gee I wonder where I’ve heard that description and thinking before too… I don’t think it fluffy thinking at all.

"Some days I think that if we offered just one or two services our processes would be fewer in number and therefore the CCR would float to the top. But we just do not do the same thing over and over." Okay this is where I think I’ve found something I think you’ll appreciate. Last winter, right at the time when I was just starting that consulting gig I mentioned, I was goggling looking for an article I had read somewhere on some TOC related website about what was called "The Fire House Solution". It was in that search that I found another document on TOC that also made mention of the the firehouse analogy in talking about DBR and TOC.

Eight days ago I made a blog post regarding Theory of Constraints and Lean Thinking as it related to shipbuilding mentioning a document that I had just discovered and Jason e-mailed me regarding what I wrote there saying "The ship yard link wasn’t bad, but it didn’t really say anything.  Did I miss something, or were you simply trying to show the fellas the successful application of TOC?" and I started to write another blog post saying yeah that was an interesting but not earthshaking article but if you want to read something great you have to read Implementing Theory of Constraints In A Job Shop Environment by John Tagawa.

Discovering that document ( it was this fellow John Tagawa’s mater thesis at MIT) was like discovering the Rosetta Stone for me. Not only was it about "Implementing Theory of Constraints In A Job Shop Environment" it was about Implementing TOC In A Job Shop Environment at BOEING AIRCRAFT! And my new client was was an aerospace JOB SHOP! Prior to this year I don’t even recall ever hearing the term "Job Shop" before but now all of a sudden I was working with one and I also realized that was exactly what my company ParadigmProjects was too!

The entry for Job Shop from the Estimating & Project Management Glossary on this site:

Job Shop - A plant or shop floor given over to the manufacture of individual works orders, usually on a once-off basis. All work undertaken in the job shop is thus unique, or, at least, is individually undertaken. Many products in the job shop will have been specially designed and will thus have unique product routes. The length of time of manufacture in a job shop is typically days or weeks rather than hours. Repetitive or batch manufacture is not associated with work undertaken in the job shop. (Glossary of Manufacturing)

Anyway finding reading and learning from Tagawas paper has ben huge for me this year. Yeah Jason the only reason I brought up that shipbuilding article in my blog was because it related to that old JLC discussion but this paper was HUGE for me. I printed it out, all 96 pages, and even bound it up to make it easier to reference and read. I’ll be very interested to hear what you fellows think of it. The link to it doesn’t always work so if you can’t download it e-mail me and I’ll send you the PDF directly.

by: admin