Monthly Archives: September 2017

(Deutsch) infoBoard mitten in Irland

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infoBoard in the middle of Irland

 

An island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean- a place that US companies like a lot, that has a great potential for English-speaking employees. I have never seen this place with such a perspective. It’s a good thing to visit places yourself so that you can change perspective. The economy is based mainly on exportation since the population is relatively small with just 4,8 million people but where there is a lot of “manufacturing” there has to be also infoBoard.

The task setting of both company owners was four weeks in advance: this in order to be able to have an overview on the orders in production, to provide a well-grounded statement based on the processing status of five units regarding new orders’ delivery dates and on the sales department of the successful company.

Our software partner in Irland held meetings and organized a training course and with his help the current 620 planning objects could be selected and assembled. Each planning object could include up to 20 individual components. Each scanned operation step was added to his software, so that the orders that had already been started to be processed would have been well visible through scanned processing steps and the cumulative hours also, through progress bars.

The scheduled orders that are not on time land up on infoBoard Sync Tool Server (in the pool-rows*). The production platform lights up brightly when infoBoard  shows delivery overruns. I wished I had brought with me the Enterprise Edition so that I could have seen a balanced planning of the Critical Chain Projectmanagement (CCPM).

InfoBoard was reordered. I was happy, the users are happy, the software partner understood the possibilities for his other clients.  The database interface is really powerful. You have the feeling as if we were part of a string quartett of a big orchestra. I have to explain this: 30 years ago, during a special night at the Hamburger Markthalle dedicated to Hamburg’s rock’n’roll bands I was the band leader of a band called “Billy de Lion and the Wild Cats”, famous in Hamburg and we played in front of 1000 spectactors. To get ready we have at our disposal 4 wind instruments and we tried a version of the song “Stagger Lee” with a horn section. This was incredibly powerful  because the sound almost threw off the stage…….and the leaves came tumblin’ down…. (the drumbeats).

Now the presentation of the board of directors. He asks what has happened: I just received an order that has to be delivered on Friday (customer-oriented flexibility seems to be a factor for success). We open a preprepared sample order, they dictate to us the time exposure in 5 parts and we plan the order. The result: the order was prepared a weeek too late of the delivery date.

I have always engaged myself so that infoBoard would be used as an operational planning tool  with a unique resource allocation. Here was only an ERP system with very detailed working steps that made it impossile to have a corrrect visualization. But since the software partner masterly treated the data and (can) listens, the presentation of the executive board could be implemented  fast and well.

Now  has to be enforced also the planned order on infoBoard. InfoBoard web application is useful for the Shopfloor, which makes a list of all of the tasks of the day that have to be processed for each sector .

The remaining task for the company employees is to take care of the working hours and the accurate work hour confirmation of the Design. Essential requirements for the quality of infoBoard’s outlook.

*) Small anecdote: While I am in the workshop it comes natural for me to say the word “pool”. With this term I (and all Germans) mean the group of unallocated tasks. We either take the pool or take from the pool. The confused expressions on my irish co-workers’ faces made me think that the word for them probably had a different meaning. Actually at the end can the production managers that agreed with me on the meaning of the expression explained. I only know that this expression has become parto fo the German language in Germany. This is another case of internationalisation: the reimportation of english words with changed meaning. Very interesting.

infoBoard an der Westküste USA

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infoBoard on the west coast of the USA

It’s hot, it’s cold. For a german man from the north like me the weather here is very different from what I am used to; here, outdoor it’s too hot while indoor too cold.

During the days of the fair we stayed in an accomodation in Koreatown (L.A). It was near the Convention Center and not far from West Hollywood with the famous stops that we had already visisted several times throughout the years.

Our hotel didin’t provide breakfast and in Koreatown there were only privately  owned shops, for this reason we drove to Downtown to have breakfast there.  Finding a parking spot was a big challenge since the price to leave tha car just  for 12 minutes was 3,50$ . At the end we found a small Austrian restaurant called FoodLab and on the terrasse on the back of its building we could enjoy a lovely cozy breakfast with real bread!

Really important and dinamic economic sectors have developped in Calfornia. The secret is: a big amount of capital that is in search for profits. Therefore were established industries that we in Germany had established time before through capital, for example the development of the diesel engine and the creation of airships.

As I imagined I was also contacted from an investment company. They were searching scalable business models. Millions have to be put at stake, otherwise it’s not interesting. I was asked how infoBoard’s exhibitor in the fair was different from the other exhibitors that also offered a planning software. After I looked up our US rival, of which I still didn’t know much: form-based data capturing system and analysing system with charts for projects. Just another project plannning tool with the number 987. Well, America needs infoBoard because we offer a planning interface that is source-oriented and can intuitively be used thanks to its graphic.

At the fair there were a lot of machine producers. The first impression that I had, is that in comparison with German fairs the technology used here is not very modern.The fairs in Hannover, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf look more glamorous.

Here come the potential clients: remain still, look, ask. Some explain infoBoard to their colleagues. We listen to them and we are surprised; how can someone think to know everything from just some images on a monitor?

Many visitors were job hoppers and they always had in mind a company that needed infoBoard, but where they didn’t not work anymore. Surprisingly a continuous change of employer brings the job hoppers to have a lot of experience with ERP implementations and software development and many said that they then knew that software developers didn’have professional experience and that for years they had to tell the developers what the program should do and that what they said was never done. Ok, I also think it is like that but the situation is going to change when infoBoard is installed. InfoBoard has benne completed and it’s the result of 20.000 developers’ team work.

Two men arrive and unfourtanetely from all it had been said I understood only the words “State, California, Cluster”. Later I took a look at their visitng card and it said “Baja California”, meaning they came from the mexican part. It’s a pity because I was looking forward to introducing them to our spanish co-workers that were standing just 1 m. away.

Other two men arrive and one of them talks in German. We probably already met at the same fair two years ago. After we talked a little about if we could present infoBoard like this  to the owner of the company on Thursday, we came to the conclusion that we should and we decided to exchange other information or oganise other appointments using my german telephone. It’s strange how we could call without problems but when we wanted to send text messages using an iPhone with the adress of the company, the texts would arrive two days after when I was at the airport. Technology is so strange at times!

On Wednesday we went out to have dinner with the company owner and the general manager. We talked about the very interesting story of the last 50 years of the compan, about  how good german education is and the chance to enter successfully the US market. The day after was the presentation of the managers and project managers out of the 400 people in the company. After an hour and a half of infoBoard’s demonstration everbody understood how useful infoBoard was since we assured short-time procedures in the machine shop of the producer.

I now understand better what Germany’s economy needs in order to improve. Banks can no more provide through Basel III the economy with enough money and there aren’t enough investors anymore. Fortunately the first small improvements are occuring in Germany and in the EU. It’s difficult for a normal person who has so many expenses to pay, to be able to save during just one life a personal capital to reinvest.

 

(Deutsch) Der Wunsch, alles ganz einfach zu haben

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The desire of having it all and easily

The visualization of complex planning schemes is already an academic field and expert discipline.

In this post I would like to talk about the reaction that people who manage a type of production characterised by complex procedures have towards infoBoard’s visualization. The situation will be clearer with an example: let’s take a car. Buyers are usually not very interested in the technology used inside but rather in the services that the car offers and in its comfort; it must be comfortable and simple. Also potential infoBoard buyers want to see services and comfort but not in a general description, they prefer to see its complex, often customized resources and examples. The infoBoard newcomer has to render during this dialogue hipothetical big transfer payments to adapt to the forming image to the production fast and to also match it with their personal goals.

Small interruption to tell about the exact opposite experience: a swiss company has all its orders in a tangled MS project. All tasks of all orders had been  catalogued under 45 precise and familiar names until year 2021 on our new infoBoard Project Konverter. The newcomer after just 30 seconds can see the result all at once, correctly finished and correctly represented. More than 600 working processes use arrows to show how they are connected to eachother. Do you think that now it is more comprehensible? It is diffcult to represent this because of the great amount of information. Is this the “overview?” (I wondered how far the tasks were from their optimal status. I already considered (had caught) the ERP systems as bad sequence handlers and so now also bad project data handlers.

But let’s go back to the complex production sequences. These are firstly the many constraints that in the USA are known as dynamic scheduling. We set up infoBoard for example fast with sample orders so that it also looks like a “dynamic schedule”. Everything through shift operations? Yes, it looks like it. Now the newcomer is nervous: is there a way to show it in an easier way? Yes, the best way is using the Webapp infoBoard Workbench.

Here we design optimized simple two-dimensional bars side by side and one beneath the other. It took us one year to achieve what we really wanted to acomplish. The implementation  developped in 6 weeks.

What does this point of view determine ? It determines how many orders are being processed simultaneously and how big are the time gaps between them (number of rows, number of bars behind and between them). An evaluation of the planning does not folllow (a comparison between net working time and processing time like in the BusinessController value stream mapping and order overview) or a traffic lights- evaluation as a reply to the CCPM question (close to the delivery date or enough puffer for the delivery date? BusinessController application CCPM-Dashboard) is still missing. Nobody can think of something more modern than infoBoard. The opinion of the most newcomers is still that you have to see to understand and to then formulate an opinion  (always also formulate the matter of that opinion), to control the result. People are used to use excel to look through a file and check everything is in order and make sure one more time that everything is correct. We live in a “Post Excel” and “Post PowerPoint” era. We are actively forming the present and future of  modern, digitalised production managers (Operational Officer).