Going Nuclear: Building the World’s Largest Puzzle

An international nuclear fusion project, known as Iter, has been making progress by finally gaining approval for the design of a component that will be one of the most challenging to install. In a forest of Provence in the south of France, there has been the construction of a site that’s purpose will be to harness the nuclear power of the sun and stars. 34 nations have joined together in what is known to be “the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet.” If this project succeeds, then global energy demand will increase by three-fold, and it will change our world that has been struggling with the fight against climate change.

This highly complex fusion reactor will be built with about a million individual parts and each component will come from different regions built around the world. Then it will be assembled “like a giant Lego model” in a building near the site. These individual parts can get as big as small houses, and the building they’re assembling it at is equal to 81 Olympic-sized swimming pools. I already cannot imagine what it will take and has taken to bring so many countries together and decide what is going to be built where. It reminds me back to one of our first classes where we made the paper fortune tellers and how it took majority of the class to work together and complete the project.

 

Complexity of Iter has been proven through the length it had taken to reach the initial stages of construction. The earliest start time for this project dates back to 1985 with meetings and discussions between the nations. Today, scientists involved have claimed it will still take another ten years of building work and an extra ten years after that for testing the reactor before it can go online. If you were one of the managers on the team for this project, how would you being planning and creating a Precedence Diagram? Do you think there could be multiple critical paths in a project like this? One of my concerns about an enormous project is the time it takes to complete it. Over time, information becomes stale and the technology used becomes outdated because of the changing markets.

A critical phase of the project is injecting plasma, a super-hot electrically-charged atomic fuel, and it is scheduled for November 2020; unfortunately, because we do not live in a perfect world, there have been delays that pushed this phase back to October 2022. An unforeseen circumstance where a worker left a towel on one of the superconducting cables became compressed within the coil causing extra work by scraping off the debris left behind. I believe this is a perfect opportunity for the project managers to consider crashing this project because it is becoming behind schedule. Do you think that crashing a critical path in such a big project dealing with nuclear reactors would be a good idea to enable them to finish the project by the due date?

 

Links: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/one-giant-leap-for-mankind-13bn-iter-project-makes-breakthrough-in-the-quest-for-nuclear-fusion-a-solution-to-climate-change-and-an-age-of-clean-cheap-energy-8590480.html

Costco vs. Sams club: what is the advantage of whole sellers?

Is buying in bulk really more cost efficient? Yes and no. Whole sellers like Costco and Sam’s club sell their products in bulks to their customers.  Both Costco and Sam’s club give out the idea to the public that if they buy in bulk, they are saving money. This is not necessarily true. It depends on what you are buying.

For example, Produce is a “do not buy”  in bulks for obvious reasons of course.  How long would it last you? It would go bad and end up in the trash if you don’t use it up quick.  But frozen foods and meats are products that you should buy in bulks.  It is more cost efficient to buy them in large quantities and it will last you long.  The disadvantages of buying in bulk and being apart of the wholesale clubs is the annual membership fees. It also easy to get carried away and go over your budget when you are buying in bulk. Expired shelf life can also be a disadvantage. But despite the disadvantages, whole sellers manage to attract people to them. This is because of the savings in buying in large quantities and having to make less shopping trips, which overall saves you time and transportation costs. The savings are the main reason as to why Costco and Sam’s club are so successful.

Now whether Sam’s club is a better whole seller or Costco is the question. Each of them have different management techniques.

One of the critical decisions in Operations management is the location. Sam’s club is located in areas where people have to budget shop while Costco tends to be located in the wealthier suburbs. In terms of managing quality is concerned, Costco provides better quality   and less selection in their management techniques while Sam’s club offers more selection in their products but with lower quality.  Hence, why Sam’s club is a better place for most everyday necessities such as toilet paper and water bottles in which brand name does not matter. But, Costco is better for those looking for better brand names such as in clothing.  It is also proven that Sam’s club membership fee is cheaper than Costco’s. Costco pays their employees more and that actually effects the environment in the store. If the employees are getting paid well, they will have a better work environment with less stress; therefore providing better customer service.

Overall, I prefer Costco over Sam’s club. This is because of the excellent customer service they provide. Management is excellent at choosing their employees and providing a good environment. The greeting workers that provide samples of products during the shopping experience is a plus point for Costco. Although the membership may be a little more pricey then Sam’s club, the products at Costco are much better in quality which is more important to me.

Would you prefer to have a membership at Costco or Sams club and why? Overall, is it better to buy in bulks?

http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com/archive/costco-vs-sam-club/

http://www.businessinsider.com/are-you-really-getting-a-better-value-when-you-buy-in-bulk-2011-10

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/01/buying-in-bulk_n_1559604.html

 

Marketing Driving Quality Control

While it’s true that upper and lower boundaries for SPC charts can be set by using some measure of central tendency and typical variation, there are sometimes other factors that will be used to determine process control limits. At Dremel, a power tool company owned by Bosch Power Tools, we heavily monitor and control our manufacturing processes. Dremel makes a line of light-duty power tools aimed at the DIY homeowner and craft/hobbyists markets. Many of their applications necessitate some degree of tool precision (of cut width, straightness, depth, smoothness, etc.) and so our processes are designed to achieve that end. Specifically, our manufacturing process controls for the presence of runout (misalignment between the tool axis and the cutting surface) and tests to look for excessive misalignment.

The interesting thing about our particular operation, though, is that the upper boundary for acceptable misalignment is not a function of the standard deviation of our process. Sure, it can be defined that way, but the number itself wasn’t selected using a statistical model. Rather, it was a marketing driven decision. Our product marketing group did extensive consumer insight research to determine what level of precision mattered for the types of projects our customers undertake. After determining that they were happy so long as the tools were at least some level of precise, the team reworked the manufacturing operation around achieving those numbers.

Of course Dremel uses some of the SPC tools we discussed in class to control its operations. For example, we track the number of defects and percent defective. It’s just that SPC isn’t the only framework in controlling our manufacturing process. Marketing, logistics, and other business functions also get involved and have a stake in making sure the products get made a certain way and according to a certain procedure. The manufacturing unit has to be responsive on all those fronts.

The point of bringing all of this up is two-fold. First, I wanted to highlight that in industry, while many of the operations management tools discussed in class are used, they are not applied in a vacuum and might be modified for a firm’s unique needs. Second, I wanted to encourage thinking about areas where  business functions begin to overlap. Where disciplines begin to intermingle, we need to have some way of making decisions about which framework (or frameworks) ought to take precedent. We need to really understand the goal being pursued and select the most appropriate bits from marketing, finance, accounting, operations, etc., to maximize success.

Are there any instances from your experience where one discipline seemed to be calling the shots in another’s area of expertise? (Exs. Did marketing ever drive finance? Did operations ever affect accounting?)

Project Managers vs Workers

During our first class, we got to do our first exercise. This exercise was making the paper puppets. Though I was not involved with the workers or even the timer guys. I was observing the whole operation. The teacher acted like the project manager, and 5 class colleagues were doing the assembly line workers job.

During this exercise, each worker was given a task to be done. The teacher was putting pressure on them as she was acting like the project manager. As a result, they were trying hard to finish as much paper puppets as possible. I was observing the behavior of each worker, since the last three workers were sitting idle until the second worker finishes her job. Her task was a longer task than the rest, thus she was a bottleneck. The class was fun and we have learned a lot.

Some of what we have learned from this class was:

  • The way you layout the operations space, is going to influence the production and product quality, it even influences the communication between the workers. During our exercise, though they were close to each other, each worker was only talking to the one right next to him/her.
  • During the exercise, the first worker tried to optimize the way he worked but the project manager which is the teacher told him to follow the process. This teaches us that if we ever want to  re-engineer a process, we need to talk to the workers. They see the obstacles, they most probably know how to optimize their work.
  • During the exercise, the workers found defected paper, but due to the pressure, they passed it on just to finish the process. What we could learn from this, when project managers or management puts so much pressure on workers, workers will have ethical issues and lead to high rate of defected products.
  • After we were done with the exercise, the teacher asked the workers how did they feel about their work load. Some said they were doing so much work, others said they didn’t have to do much. It is probably one of most faced issue with operation workers. Work isn’t divided equally among workers.
  • We also have discussed what we could have done to help our second worker which she had more complicated work to do, we have came with so many solutions which seemed to help, like hiring one more worker with her. Or distributing the work among other workers too.
Here are some pictures that I took during class while we were doing the exercise: (Note: Some faces are blurred because they asked me to blur their faces). Edit: One more colleague asked for her picture to be blurred., so I re-uploaded the images.