The Beard And Cycle Time
At Bill and Dave's company, the main priority for those working on the production line is supposed to be simple: Get a high quality unit out the door and into the customer's hands. There were many different ways of tracking our performance in doing this, but one of the main metrics was this thing management called cycle time. Cycle time is how long it takes from the time one of our customers picks up the phone and says "Hey, give me one of them there instrument thingies" until the product is delivered to the customer. Depending on the product, this time can range anywhere from a couple days for small items, up to 6 months or more for complex systems.
On The Beard's line, this goal was around 8 weeks. Production was given a big chunk of this time to assemble, test, and ship the customer's product. Unfortunately, there were always reasons we could very rarely meet this goal. Unlike many of the situations in recent times our problem was simply that people didn't care because there were no consequences to missing our deadlines. This had been a problem company wide since the 1980's when Bill and Dave were the only game in town and if you the customer had to wait a year for your instrument, you had to wait a year. Nobody else made this stuff back then.
Of course, in meetings, all kinds of excuses were heard about why people just couldn't keep up with the demand. Usually it involved some variation of claiming that they had too many "collateral duties" to attend to so they couldn't perform their primary jobs. Some employee's collateral duties could also be referred to as "second jobs" because they spend a large amount of the day on eBay watching their items. Of course The Beard had to continue to let people spend time on their collateral duties because more often than not, it was something he was actually supposed to be doing but was too inept to do week after week. At the same time, those of us on swingshift were acutely aware of the root cause: dayshift didn't do shit. We would go home at night, and come back the next day to discover more often than not instruments would be sitting exactly where we'd left them the night before! Nobody on dayshift had even attempted to push them through our test process. We just sucked it up week after week, because our focus was on the fact that some customer dropped over $100,000 for this unit and he wanted it when we said he'd get it. The Beard's pretty charts and development plans could wait.
Eventually, things got so bad that a production engineer was actually assigned to observe the process and find out the real reason cycle time was going up. We got lucky. The engineer they assigned to investigate the problem wasn't some fresh out of college engineer. No, they assigned an old school Engineer. This guy was schooled in the heyday of Silicon Valley. He had been working on this type of instrument since it was originally developed years ago, and if anyone could see thru the BS, this guy could. We patiently waited until a few days later when he came to swingshift for our inputs. We were direct and to the point: people aren't being held responsible for doing their primary job. The work piles up on a few people and we can't handle the volume. We honestly thought that he would take immediate action, but a week or two goes by, and nothing really happens. We assume that nobody can believe it's something as simple as people not doing their main job.
Finally, one night we see the way to make our point. The Beard's production line had recently switched to some newfangled test stations that ran Windows2000. This means that they all had a built-in Windows screensaver. You know how people at work are, someone always has to put some sort of screensaver on, but the line standard screensaver was a basic time/date screensaver. We noticed that on roughly all 18 test stations that the screensaver timeout was 30 minutes. We then noticed that during the day, the screensavers quite often did not get removed for hours at a time. This meant that nobody on the entire dayshift team was checking to see if the test software was even ready to continue.
Often, you didn't have to even DO anything, the test software was just asking you to make sure a certain cable or connector was attached properly. Once you verified it was and hit enter, the station would run itself for anywhere between 30 seconds to 45 minutes or so.
We grabbed the engineer and told him to watch how often the screensavers were not running over the next couple days. We had to explain the 30 minute turn-on thing to him. He was a UNIX guy and didn't know squat about Windows at this point in time. Did I mention he was old-school? Anyway, once it dawned on him that if he saw the screensaver, that meant nobody had checked that station for at least 30 minutes, he got a gleam in his eye. Here was proof of a problem. The next week, the big-wigs got together for their pow-wow on cycle time. None of us were in that meeting, we were out repairing units. However, a few of The Beard's dayshift employees were on the Cycle Time committee. Of course these are the same people that can't see that sitting in meetings for 20 hours a week is affecting production, while at the same time they schedule more meetings to figure it out.
The day after the big pow-wow we come into work for our normal swingshift repair-a-thon. We notice something VERY peculiar. Not one single test station is running a screensaver. How could this be? Did dayshift kick it into gear? We were amazed. It took only another day to figure out what happened. Someone had leaked the beans to our dayshift counterparts, and they were quick to devise a remedy. Each time one of them went to the bathroom or left the area to have a smoke or to get more coffee, they would simply walk down the aisle of test racks and bang the mouse tray on each station to reset the screensaver timer. "Look at us now! Not a screensaver in sight! Dayshift rules!!!"
Cycle time is still increasing, but that's how it goes working at Bill and Dave's...
On The Beard's line, this goal was around 8 weeks. Production was given a big chunk of this time to assemble, test, and ship the customer's product. Unfortunately, there were always reasons we could very rarely meet this goal. Unlike many of the situations in recent times our problem was simply that people didn't care because there were no consequences to missing our deadlines. This had been a problem company wide since the 1980's when Bill and Dave were the only game in town and if you the customer had to wait a year for your instrument, you had to wait a year. Nobody else made this stuff back then.
Of course, in meetings, all kinds of excuses were heard about why people just couldn't keep up with the demand. Usually it involved some variation of claiming that they had too many "collateral duties" to attend to so they couldn't perform their primary jobs. Some employee's collateral duties could also be referred to as "second jobs" because they spend a large amount of the day on eBay watching their items. Of course The Beard had to continue to let people spend time on their collateral duties because more often than not, it was something he was actually supposed to be doing but was too inept to do week after week. At the same time, those of us on swingshift were acutely aware of the root cause: dayshift didn't do shit. We would go home at night, and come back the next day to discover more often than not instruments would be sitting exactly where we'd left them the night before! Nobody on dayshift had even attempted to push them through our test process. We just sucked it up week after week, because our focus was on the fact that some customer dropped over $100,000 for this unit and he wanted it when we said he'd get it. The Beard's pretty charts and development plans could wait.
Eventually, things got so bad that a production engineer was actually assigned to observe the process and find out the real reason cycle time was going up. We got lucky. The engineer they assigned to investigate the problem wasn't some fresh out of college engineer. No, they assigned an old school Engineer. This guy was schooled in the heyday of Silicon Valley. He had been working on this type of instrument since it was originally developed years ago, and if anyone could see thru the BS, this guy could. We patiently waited until a few days later when he came to swingshift for our inputs. We were direct and to the point: people aren't being held responsible for doing their primary job. The work piles up on a few people and we can't handle the volume. We honestly thought that he would take immediate action, but a week or two goes by, and nothing really happens. We assume that nobody can believe it's something as simple as people not doing their main job.
Finally, one night we see the way to make our point. The Beard's production line had recently switched to some newfangled test stations that ran Windows2000. This means that they all had a built-in Windows screensaver. You know how people at work are, someone always has to put some sort of screensaver on, but the line standard screensaver was a basic time/date screensaver. We noticed that on roughly all 18 test stations that the screensaver timeout was 30 minutes. We then noticed that during the day, the screensavers quite often did not get removed for hours at a time. This meant that nobody on the entire dayshift team was checking to see if the test software was even ready to continue.
Often, you didn't have to even DO anything, the test software was just asking you to make sure a certain cable or connector was attached properly. Once you verified it was and hit enter, the station would run itself for anywhere between 30 seconds to 45 minutes or so.
We grabbed the engineer and told him to watch how often the screensavers were not running over the next couple days. We had to explain the 30 minute turn-on thing to him. He was a UNIX guy and didn't know squat about Windows at this point in time. Did I mention he was old-school? Anyway, once it dawned on him that if he saw the screensaver, that meant nobody had checked that station for at least 30 minutes, he got a gleam in his eye. Here was proof of a problem. The next week, the big-wigs got together for their pow-wow on cycle time. None of us were in that meeting, we were out repairing units. However, a few of The Beard's dayshift employees were on the Cycle Time committee. Of course these are the same people that can't see that sitting in meetings for 20 hours a week is affecting production, while at the same time they schedule more meetings to figure it out.
The day after the big pow-wow we come into work for our normal swingshift repair-a-thon. We notice something VERY peculiar. Not one single test station is running a screensaver. How could this be? Did dayshift kick it into gear? We were amazed. It took only another day to figure out what happened. Someone had leaked the beans to our dayshift counterparts, and they were quick to devise a remedy. Each time one of them went to the bathroom or left the area to have a smoke or to get more coffee, they would simply walk down the aisle of test racks and bang the mouse tray on each station to reset the screensaver timer. "Look at us now! Not a screensaver in sight! Dayshift rules!!!"
Cycle time is still increasing, but that's how it goes working at Bill and Dave's...
posted by factory_peasant at 9:55 AM
3 Comments:
very trixxy lazy hobbits's
This was a most interesting time in the long line of the beards managerial suckatude. The product line at the time was still fairly new and was developed to after time take over the section making all other products obsolete. So when it was determined that the beard would be it's supervisor I could only imagine the parade of snorks he would bring in to build up the production line crew. You see when the beard first came out of his first stint in training in the mid 90's he inherited the employees on that line this line was brand new so he could build it up as he pleased. By the time of this occurence beard already ran off or exiled a number of good experienced or up and coming techs such as: shoelaces, one eye, dave, the reverend blue jeans and myself. Unfortunately someone had to be the lead tech at night and hence paul was recruited.
I can remember times working down there introducing a product I would have to walk the gauntlet of dweebs just to get to pauls desk and find out whats going on that day. Let's see there was Jimmy Hoffa who was known to go missing entire shifts at a time, ebayer self exlanatory, and topology because every problem she ran into was due to the topology of the test station. I myself have been known to call topology Chancey Gardener from time to time, but that is a little more difficult to explain.
It was difficult to get any solution to the problem mentioned in this installment. Everytime beard caught wind of what you were doing he would either make your life hell or implement a solution to your solution. God forbid he got any of his people to do anything production orientated. He would rather have his butt kissed.
one-eye always reminded me of that crazy old Chinaman with the 7 demon bag in the movie Big Trouble In Little China. i think it was because of his semi-constant squint expression on his face.
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