Elting Mechanical Enterprises

Link: http://www.eltingmechanical.com

Congratulations to the winners of the Automotive X Prize. If you don't know, this was a competition to design, develop and build a vehicle to travel 100 miles on one gallon of fuel (or equivalent). For more details see their site here.

Hopefully, we all end up winners in the aftermath of this engineering contest. I sincerely hope that the gravity of this event is not lost in all the trivial matters the media focuses on, i.e. Tea Party nazis , Jersey Shore cast members, or some disgusting behavior of a Hollywood "star".

The true stars are the engineers and technicians whose efforts in improving transportation efficiencies will have a much greater impact on all our lives than the 9 billion dollar atom smasher at CERN. This event should be marked as one of the most important days in world history. We as consumers need to make it known to our favorite car manufacturers that we want better, more efficient vehicles and not just more bells and whistles.

Finding the right solution can be difficult but, even worse if one is looking for it in the wrong place.

Often clients will tell me that they have a production problem and it is all because of our "widget" machine and they want me to have a look at and see what can be done to fix it. Once I've gotten to see the widget machine in action I ask, "so, tell me what's the problem? It appears to working fine. I see that its pumping out gadgets at a pretty good rate so, what gives?" The usual reply is something like, "its working fine now, but it breaks down all the time" or, "its doesn't produce the gadget to spec but, today its doing okay" or something to that effect. Sound familiar?

At this point, I start my "investigation". I round up the usual suspects (line operators, maintenance techs, engineers) and start in with the questions. It never fails to amaze me how no matter what kind of gadget a company produces, they all suffer from the same problem when it comes to solving production issues, perception is their reality. Facts don't lie but, people do. Or at least they lie to themselves and they believe their own lies and then the lies become the "truth".

So, how do we fix their production problem. First, we start with the end in mind. Meaning, what is the target throughput of there operation. How many gadgets need to be shipped. Working "backwards" through the operation, allows me to get down to what is truly important, finding the real bottlenecks in the processes. One of the best ways to find bottlenecks is looking at the data that has already been collected. Once its been correctly analyzed, patterns can be found that usually lead to causes in lost production. The trick to this is the "correctly analyzed" part of this investigation. People have a "funny" tendency to see what they want to see or they just don't think to look at the data in a way that can help them see the real issues.

Once a client sees that the widget machine is not the real problem and its actually the gizmo machine that is truly slowing the process down, its like an "ah ha" moment. Sometimes, it just takes a bit of courage to press the client and find the real truth.