Tag: quality

OM in the News: At Ford, Quality Is Now Problem 1

In May, Ford recalled some Ford Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators after reports of fires while vehicles were parked. In June, it recalled 49,000 Mustang electric SUVs over concerns that the battery contactors could overheat. In the first 7 months of the year, Ford had 46 separate safety recalls on 6.8 million vehicles, more than any other U.S. auto maker.

Once touted for its quality record—“Quality is Job 1” was its slogan for much of the 1980s and 1990s—last year Ford set aside more than $4 billion for warranty costs, up 76% from 5 years earlier. Those billions that Ford spends yearly on warranty repairs and recalls could instead have gone towards spending for new EV models, and battery and manufacturing plants, writes The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 6-7, 2022).

Ford recalled Mustang Mach-E electric SUVs.

In 2021, Ford allocated $1,041 per vehicle for covering warranty claims compared with $713 per vehicle for rival GM. This year, in addition to the recalls, auto-safety regulators also opened a defect investigation into 2021 Ford Broncos after receiving reports of “catastrophic engine failures” at highway speeds.

One of the challenges at Ford was that it tried to make too many last-minute design and engineering changes ahead of a new-vehicle launch, increasing the risk of problems down the line. Workers rallied to fix problems when they blew up, but weren’t empowered to flag them early in the process when there was still time to head them off. Consumer Reports says Ford has too many new-model launches bunched together and often makes more substantive changes in its redesigns, while other car companies use more carry-over parts.

Ford recently installed video cameras to monitor the early build of vehicles—before production—to target any steps they can eliminate or simplify. Higher tech cameras are now used to inspect the vehicles for quality, too, allowing workers to scour for an incorrectly placed hose or a paint blemish. “We are placing more time and emphasis on ensuring everything is done right upfront to prevent quality issues from manifesting later in the development process,” says Ford’s new quality czar.

How Ford compares itself to rivals in quality has changed, too. It now sets its quality targets against the benchmarks of its competitors. One example is the quality of Ford’s Bronco SUV as compared with the Jeep Wrangler.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Select one of the 7 tools of TQM found in your Heizer/Render/Munson text in Figure 6.5 and describe how Ford might use it.
  2. When and where should Ford inspect according to Chapter 6?

Guest Post: Emergency Services and COVID

Professor Howard Weiss, recently retired from Temple University, looks at quality issues arising from COVID.

Several sources have reported that due to COVID there has been a decrease in Emergency Services quality. In Philadelphia, the average police response time, the time between a police dispatcher receiving the call and the arrival of the police, was 20% higher in 2021 than in 2020.  In Los Angeles, response times to emergencies increased due to over 200 firefighters missing their shift. In San Diego, response times for its most urgent calls for service rose from 21 minutes in 2018 to 28 minutes in 2020. The problem, of course, is not limited to the U.S. Police response times have also increased in England, and Bermuda has had 48 officers unable to work as opposed to a more normal 16 officers. In addition to delayed response times, no-shows of police, has become more common since the onset of COVID.

The major reasons for the increase in response time are:

  • Unavailable emergency personnel because they have been stricken with COVID or quarantined because they were with someone who had COVID
  • Layoffs of emergency personnel who are not vaccinated
  • Staffing shortages in the 911 call centers
  • A spike in crime
  • Technology issues

A major concern, if the slow response times continue, is that if police do not respond in a timely fashion then people will stop calling the police at all.

Chapter 13 of your Heizer/Render/Munson textbook notes that “Police and fire departments have provisions for calling in off-duty personnel for major emergencies. Where the emergency is extended, police or fire personnel may work longer hours and extra shifts.” To increase capacity, some cities have done this and some cities have relaxed quarantine rules so emergency personnel can get back to work more quickly. Others have canceled vacation times for personnel. Some cities have brought in others to increase capacity. Another option is to put a web site in place for minor problems such as losing a driver’s license in order to reduce the demand for emergency services.

Not all increases in response times have been due to COVID. For example, in Montreal, response times are slower due to the merger of two police stations. Ft. Worth, Texas, which has the highest response time goal of Texas’ five major cities, had response times that were deemed too slow prior to COVID.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. As a manager in your town, how would you address this concern?
  2. What other fields are experiencing the same issues?

OM in the News: Boeing’s Operations Management Problems

Some 787s are even being stored in the desert.

How would you like to be in charge of operations at Boeing? There are forecasting problems, capacity issues, quality failures, and supply chain snarls. The result: Boeing’s commercial airplanes unit delivered an operating loss of $472 million in the quarter, says The Wall Street Journal (July 28, 2021).

This follows two all-consuming crises. Its MAX jets had been grounded for nearly two years after two fatal crashes that took 346 lives, and the pandemic had sapped demand for new airplanes as passengers stayed home and airlines retrenched. The company has also grappled with production-quality problems on its 787 Dreamliner. Global airline capacity remains 30% below pre-pandemic levels and industry executives expect it to take until 2024 to catch up.

U.S. aerospace companies last year announced plans to shed more than 100,000 jobs, including many at Boeing’s 12,000 suppliers. Boeing itself has plans to cut its own workforce by almost 1/5 to around 140,000 by the end of this year. While the return of the 737 MAX has bolstered sales and cash, Boeing has recently slowed Dreamliner production while it addresses new issues with the planes. The company has delayed deliveries to fix defects that emerged about a year ago and is awaiting regulatory approval for a plan to inspect aircraft. With customers unwilling or unable to receive deliveries of their new 787s, Boeing has 50 undelivered widebodies scattered around its facilities and is running out of space to park them.

The new 787 problem surfaced on the forward pressure bulkhead at the front of the plane. It involves the skin of the aircraft and is similar to a previously disclosed Dreamliner issue found elsewhere on the planes. Engineers at Boeing and the FAA are trying to understand the defect’s potential to cause premature fatigue on a key part of the aircraft’s structure.

Further, the firm needs orders from China to participate fully in a stronger-than-expected recovery in air travel. Boeing hasn’t secured a direct new jetliner order from China in almost 4 years, and has been pushing for improved trade relations with the U.S.  Boeing’s payroll depends on U.S.-China trade relations, says its CEO.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How can Boeing forecast jet sales in the coming years? What techniques in Chapter 4 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text are applicable?
  2. Why is Boeing facing continuing quality problems?

OM in the News: Making Vaccine Bottles

Combating the Covid-19 pandemic is at the top of the global agenda. Providing vaccines to populations around the globe means providing 8 billion doses—with only one for every person in the world. In addition to the availability of the vaccine, a decisive factor in the race against time is the accessibility of the glass vials. Producers of the vials are massively ramping up their production so as not to become the proverbial bottleneck in the supply chain, reports New Equipment Digest (April 6, 2021).

vaccine

However, medical-grade vaccine vials are not standard glass tubes. They are all made of the special glass borosilicate and require customized production lines. For example, the glass must be resistant to a wide range of chemicals and temperature changes and must not contaminate medicines. Any interaction between the container and the liquid inside must be prevented, as any chemical interference could affect the vaccine. Even the smallest scratch, crack or fissure can render an entire batch unusable, contaminate the line during the filling process or even lead to a machine standstill.

The demands on manufacturers are enormous: it is not only a matter of producing large quantities quickly but also of maintaining particularly high-quality standards. So what is needed is very fast quality control with high reliability in defect detection. One solution is vision systems, our topic on page 296 in Chapter 7. Powerful cameras can capture images of 120 vials per minute to be inspected for dimensional accuracy or surface condition with very high precision. Defects such as cracks, scratches, chips, inclusions or stains are detected with an accuracy of 0.1 square millimeters. Intelligent software enables accurate fault description analysis and classification. Testing takes place at various points in the manufacturing process, such as directly after the bottles have been formed or shortly before packaging.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What are vision systems and why are they a useful OM tool?
  2. Which of the quality control tools in Chapter 6 (Figure 6.6) of your Heizer/Render/Munson text could vial producers employ?

Good OM Reading: Quality is Free

This Thanksgiving, 2020, is unlike any in our living past. Yet we are still healthy, continue to teach (albeit differently), and have much to be grateful for. So I thought I would share with you and your students my memories of a friend and mentor, Philip Crosby, who died almost 20 years years ago. Crosby is famous for his dozen books on management and quality, starting with his classic 1979, Quality is Free, published by McGraw Hill.

Crosby guest-lectured in my MBA classes every semester for a decade and I required my students to select any of his books and write a 1-page report on how they personally benefitted from his insights. To this day, if you visit management offices of quality-conscious manufacturers worldwide, you are likely to hear the words “zero defects” and “do it right the first time,” with Crosby’s 4 absolutes of quality as their cornerstones.

Here are his words about that 1979 book: It goes back to how people think about quality. Conventionally, quality is always looked at as goodness, as gold-plating. Quality is viewed as an expense, a trade-off, something that you have to spend money on. But you can’t manage with goodness as your definition of quality. Quality is conformance to carefully thought-out requirements. So quality is free because it is already built-in. The expense of quality is nonconformance.

Crosby believed that workers are not the problem with quality–that they pretty much do what management tells them to do. He wrote: “People think that quality is some undefinable thing that you only know when you see it. Yet quality requirements are clear. They talk about vague things like delighting the customer, but you can’t tell people what that really means, so you can’t manage that way.”

His 4 absolutes are: 1. quality is conformance to requirements, not goodness.; 2. the basic aim of quality management is prevention, not appraisal; 3. that zero defects is the performance standard, not some acceptable level of defects like 6-sigma; and 4. the measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance.

Time flies by, but Crosby’s books are always worth a second read.

Guest Post: Student Perspectives on the MyOMLab Quality Management Simulation

Wende Huehn-Brown is Professor of Supply Chain Management at St. Petersburg College in Florida. She continues her review of our five OM simulations.

As shared in prior guest posts, the Heizer/Render/Munson MyOMLab simulations offer a realistic scenario to help students further evaluate their OM lessons. The Quality Management simulation uses the hospitality industry, in which students role play a restaurant manager. This simulation helps students see the details that go into improving quality for an organization to be more successful. Almost 60% of my students found this relatable to their work experiences.

This simulation challenges students to use the quality management principles from the textbook. Students need to think logically about the evidence they are given to make decisions about various investments to improve customer service and reduce failure rates. Visualizing the options to prioritize further actions needed gives students some insight on what a manager must deal with, especially when pressured to turn around a restaurant. The various problems students are given really does draws them into the scenario!

Students reflected on options that supported immediate operating needs, as well as options that may be nice to consider, but did not necessarily address complaints or fix major issues. One student came up with several ideas, not even built in the simulation, that were great examples of critically thinking about the lessons to extend additional realistic options.

Students need to sift through the feedback they are given to identify relevant customer and staff issues to support their financial and customer service goals. The majority of the students felt the simulation was fun as it gave them a sense of accomplishment and pride to positively influence profits and customer reviews over the simulated one-year time period. Some students further commented how the simulation was driving them to even improve quality at their work!

OM in the News: It Takes a Long Time to Repair a Tesla

Some owners have had a Tesla waiting 3 months for parts to arrive.

Tesla has cranked up its Model 3 production in recent months, enabling many buyers to get their vehicles after long waits, reports The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 11, 2019). But as Tesla’s U.S. sales approach those of luxury auto makers like BMW and Mercedes-Benz, it has encountered new logistical problems, from delivery and servicing of a growing fleet to balancing supply and demand. A Florida resident who recently damaged his bumper in a low-speed collision, had to wait 3 months for the repair shop to get the spare parts from Tesla and fix his car.

The unusually long wait for a repair underlines a drawback of being a Tesla customer. The upstart car company has created a coveted luxury brand but is still learning some of the basics of the auto business. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has acknowledged some of the operational challenges, saying: “We’ve just been very silly about where we store our parts. Tesla was shipping spare parts from China to the U.S. and then back to customers in China.”

Tesla plans to deliver as many as 400,000 vehicles world-wide this year, roughly four times what it sold 2 years ago. Customers in recent months have been venting on social media about trouble getting repair appointments, long waits for those fixes and flaws in newly delivered vehicles, whether they are the paint job or cracks in windows. Part of the problem is that Tesla, unlike other auto makers, doesn’t have a network of hundreds of franchise dealerships to sell and service its vehicles. It has long touted this as an advantage, giving it more control over the customer experience. But it means Tesla has to pay for service centers and to staff them.

Tesla slid to 27th of 29 automotive brands ranked for reliability by Consumer Reports last year. The Model 3 earned an “average” rating.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How can Tesla address this problem?
  2. What are the main operations issues that the automaker has had to deal with in the past 2 years?

OM in the News: Does Tesla Have a Quality Problem?

A car in the Scottsdale lot marked “inv,” or inventory, indicating it has no buyer, with service needs noted.

Tesla has been parking hundreds and hundreds of cars at lots and industrial buildings in Burbank, Antioch, and Lathrop, Calif, reports The New York Times (Oct. 2, 2018). Last week, a batch of about 100 Model 3s turned up in Bellevue, Wash., with smaller collections in Chicago, Dallas, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. The parked vehicles were discovered over the last two months by amateur detectives who closely follow the company stock.

Elon Musk recently acknowledged that the company was having difficulty shipping cars to customers, saying Tesla was in “delivery logistics hell.” He attributed the problem to a shortage of trucks to haul cars around the country. But the Auto Haulers Association says it is not aware of any shortage of car haulers, and that other automakers that are not having shipping troubles.

Is Tesla simply gathering cars together before shipping them to customers, or bringing cars with defects together to repair them before delivery? If the former, it suggests Tesla failed in a critical task: It didn’t set up an efficient way of delivering hundreds of cars a day as it was scrambling to produce 5,000 a week. A more worrisome problem would be if Tesla built these cars and now doesn’t have customers willing to take them. Musk had long promised that the Model 3 would be available for as little as $35,000. But the least costly version available now starts at $49,000.

In some cases, cars have been marked — with a bar-coded sticker or with grease pencil on the windshield — to indicate that they are inventory vehicles, meaning they have no customers awaiting them. Some markings indicate repairs required before the cars can be sold. In the rush to ramp up Model 3 production, Tesla has faced growing issues with vehicle quality. Some customers have complained that cars arrived with scratches, loose parts and other manufacturing defects. And a new headache has cropped up: severe shortages of replacement parts. Owners needing repairs have complained of waiting a month or longer for parts.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What is Tesla’s biggest OM issue?
  2. Why is the company only producing high-option models of Tesla 3?

 

OM in the News: Harley-Davidson Discovered “The Problem Was Us”

“As he struggled to save Harley-Davidson Inc. from financial ruin in the mid-1980s, Vaughn Beals got a bit of help from Uncle Sam in the form of temporary tariffs on imports of Japanese motorcycles,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 1-2, 2018). But the CEO’s success in preserving one of America’s strongest brands owed more to one of his insights: The real problem wasn’t the Japanese. It was Harley’s inefficient factories and slipshod quality.

As CEO for most of the 1980s, Beals, who passed away August 18th at age 90, declared war on defects, slashed production costs and aimed marketing at a colossal opportunity: Baby boomers, reaching middle age, were itching for a way to feel young and rebellious again, if only on weekends. “For years we tried to figure out why the Japanese were beating us so badly,” Beals said in 1988. “First we thought it was their culture. Then we thought it was automation. Then we thought it was dumping. Finally, we realized the problem was us, not them.”

Beals told workers to inspect every Harley motorcycle as it came off the line, rather only a sample, and sought suggestions from workers on improving quality. Meanwhile, Harley honchos toured Japanese plants and came back with ideas. Previously, Harley made parts in huge batches and stored them. Inventories were so bloated that workers sometimes couldn’t find a part by the time it was needed. Now the company began making parts only as needed, to match current motorcycle production.

As part of the effort to attract customers who didn’t fit the old Hell’s Angels image, Harley made the motorcycles more comfortable. It reduced vibration on touring bikes by mounting engines on rubber. One thing didn’t change: The rumbling sound from the tailpipe. “It makes your heart thump a bit,” said an Arizona dentist.

We feature Harley in our Global Company Profile in Chapter 7.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Describe Harley’s production process (see Ch. 7).
  2. What changes has Harley made over the past decades?

OM in the News: Tesla’s Changing Assembly Line

The Model 3’s third assembly line, under a tent.

Just outside Tesla’s sprawling electric-car Fremont, Calif. plant, an unusual structure has taken shape in the past few weeks: a tent, about 50 feet high and several hundred feet long. Its purpose is as notable as its hasty construction, writes The New York Times (July 1, 2018). The tent houses a 3rd assembly line — part of a desperate effort to speed up production of the Model 3. Just 2 years ago, Tesla envisioned 2018 as a breakthrough moment.  With a high-speed, high-tech assembly process, the company’s sales would soar more than fivefold, to half a million vehicles. It hasn’t turned out that way. As CEO Elon Musk said: “the company faced a prolonged period of manufacturing hell.”

Tesla has raced to iron out kinks in the assembly process, mainly by scrapping some complicated robots that proved ill-suited to certain tasks and hiring hundreds of workers to replace them. On the factory floor, it’s a frantic race that has taken a toll on some employees. Trying to break with standard auto-industry practices, Tesla is searching for ways to shorten the time that robots take to weld parts. It is even making seats, a component most car companies leave to specialized suppliers. And it is doing this while trying to root out bottlenecks and glitches in the manufacturing process.

Established car companies master the process with assembly-line workers and then find ways for machines to take over some of the work. Tesla did the opposite. It designed a highly automated production line populated by over 1,000 robots. But the most efficient lines use a lot of manual labor. “The most automated ones are at the bottom of the list,” said one industry expert.

Adding a new assembly line, even temporarily, is a rare and risky move in the auto industry. A line set up hastily, in an untested environment, might not achieve the quality Tesla promises. The first step in auto quality is stability.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What do you think is the impact on the workers on the Model 3 lines?
  2. What did Tesla do wrong?

 

OM in the News: Japan’s Manufacturing Crisis

Hiroya Kawasaki, CEO of Kobe Steel, bowed as he left a news conference in Tokyo

Japan’s reputation for flawless manufacturing quality and efficiency transformed the country’s postwar economy, changed business practices world-wide and spawned a library’s worth of management manuals and business advice books. “Now, the model is cracking,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 5, 2018).

Kobe Steel, Mitsubishi Materials, and Subaru have all just admitted to manipulating quality inspections. Takata declared bankruptcy last year after supplying 50 million defective vehicle air bags in the U.S. Mitsubishi Motors has admitted covering up vehicle faults and falsifying fuel-economy data. Nissan says its Japanese factories let unqualified employees perform final quality inspections. Indeed, Japanese brands have been bested by U.S. car makers in the past 2 years.

The scandals call into question one of the world’s most influential theories of management and manufacturing. Japan’s model, celebrated in publications such as HBR, hinges largely on the concept of kaizen, or “continuous improvement.” Kaizen means eliminating unnecessary activity, reducing excess inventory and using teamwork to fix problems when they arise. It also places enormous responsibility on the line workers (called genba) at the factory-floor level to manage daily operations and generate innovation. The genba have traditionally been guaranteed jobs for life in return for dedication. But many Japanese companies can no longer afford the luxury of  lifetime employment for factory craftsmen.

At Kobe Steel, quality-checking staffers became the first targets of layoffs because they didn’t appear as busy as production-line workers. Line workers were told to make quality checks themselves, and some checks were outsourced after the company suspended hiring. Workers involved in data falsification felt they had no choice because they needed to keep production moving.

(Japan, nonetheless, remains a manufacturing powerhouse, ranking 3rd in manufacturing output, behind China and the U.S. and just ahead of Germany).

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Explain the concept of kaizen.
  2. Why is the Japanese system facing a crisis?

 

OM in the News: Quality Control and the Boeing 787

American Airlines supervisors check the rudder and inspect the paint on a new 787. The tail has 13 different colors and is tricky to paint, so it gets close inspection

“Imagine you’re buying a $270 million car. You’d want to kick the tires pretty hard. That’s what airlines do with new airplanes,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 31, 2017). Delivering one widebody airplane is a big deal—each plane has a list price roughly the cost of a high-rise hotel.

Carriers like American Airlines station their own engineers at Boeing factories to watch their flying machines get built and check parts as they arrive. Then they send flight attendants, mechanics and pilots for what are called shakedown inspections.

“The rubber meets the road here,” says an American manager, as he begins checking a brand new Boeing 787. “It’s inspected and it’s inspected and it’s inspected. And yet we still find things.” American is taking delivery of 57 new planes this year.  Boeing does its own testing, but buyers do their own extra inspection–and note an average of 140 items on a plane’s punchlist.

Five flight attendants, a couple of mechanical experts and an American test pilot attack the 285-passenger plane. All the doors and panels are opened for inspection. Flight attendants shake each seat violently, grab the headrest and pull it up and jerk the cord on each entertainment controller. They test power ports, USB ports, audio jacks and the entertainment system. They open all tray tables, turn all lights on and off. They recline each seat with knee-knocking force. They flush all the toilets, blow fake smoke into smoke alarms, make sure all prerecorded emergency messages sound when required.

Inside the cockpit, an American test pilot flies the jet to its limits, making sure alarms sound when he increases air speed or slows the plane down to stall speed. He turns it sharply until “bank angle” warnings sound. Each engine gets shut down and restarted in the air. Every backup and emergency system is put into use to make sure it works.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why do airlines feel the need to make the quality inspections?
  2. What tools that we see in Chapter 6 could Boeing use to improve quality even further?

OM in the News: Samsung’s Battery Fix Gets a C Grade

To figure out what caused its Note 7 to catch on fire, Samsung put 200,000 phones through several different tests
To figure out what caused its Note 7 to catch on fire, Samsung put 200,000 phones through different tests

“After four months of testing over 200,000 phones,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 23, 2017), “what did Samsung determine caused its flagship Note 7 to catch fire?” The answer: Bad batteries. Two separate sets of bad batteries made by two different companies.

But what Samsung is still missing is its Tylenol moment. In 1982, Johnson & Johnson issued a massive recall after 7 people died from taking Tylenol products laced with cyanide. It led the company, and then the rest of the industry, to rethink pill packaging. Consumers saw the new seals as a mark of safety and protection. Samsung’s work on a seal that consumers can understand is still incomplete.

A quick recap: Note 7’s with 2 different versions of the battery–Samsung calls them A and B–were released last August. Soon after, some of the phones with Battery A started to burn up. Samsung recalled the phones, quickly replacing them with just Battery B models. Some of these phones started to burn up also, compelling Samsung to yank the phone altogether.

After erecting labs with 700 staff to test 30,000 batteries, Samsung has concluded that neither its hardware nor software was to blame. Instead, Samsung says the battery had issues.

Battery A had a design issue: There wasn’t enough room inside the battery for routine expansion of its component electrodes. Battery B had a welding issue caused by a manufacturing defect, which didn’t appear until production ramped up after Battery A was pulled from the market. (The resulting microscopic burrs poked through barriers inside the battery).

The core of the problem was that Samsung didn’t have the quality controls needed to identify the battery problems before they reached consumers.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. What responsibility might Samsung share in setting the specifications and requirements for the Note 7 batteries?
  2. How can a phone maker prevent this kind of problem in the future?

Video Tip: Using Our Five Alaska Airlines Video Case Studies

Barry and Jay filming in an Alaska Airlines cockpit
Barry and Jay filming the videos in an Alaska Airlines cockpit

The Wall Street Journal‘s annual scorecard of U.S. airline performance (Jan. 12, 2017), which ranks major carriers on 7 different measures important to travelers, has just been released.  We note that the company we prominently feature in our latest edition, Alaska Airlines, topped the scorecard as the best overall performer for the 4th-straight year, edging out Delta. Alaska also scored 1st in: on-time arrivals, least extreme delays, least 2-hour tarmac delays, and in least number of complaints. It was 3rd in cancelled flights and involuntary bumping, and 4th in mishandled bags.

 The Seattle-based airline says its poor baggage showing in the 2016 scorecard drove a deep study of which flights were causing the most mishandled bags. Alaska began bar-code scanning of every bag going on and off planes. It also figured out which cities, which shifts and which flights had the most problems and found delays with bags transferring from other airlines. So instead of waiting for bags to come through an airport sorting system, Alaska now takes carts to other airlines in Seattle and waits for connecting bags at the tails of arriving airplanes.
Here are the 5 short videos we provide free to adopters:

Quality Counts at Alaska Airlines (Ch.6): “If it is not measured, it is not managed,” says one Alaska exec in this case that provides explicit performance metrics.

Alaska Airlines: 20-Minute Baggage Process–Guaranteed! (Ch.7): Students can flowchart the process a bag follows from kiosk to destination carousel after watching this video.

The People Focus: Human Resources at Alaska Airlines (Ch.10): The employee “Empowerment Toolkit” reminds us of Ritz Carlton’s famous customer service philosophy.

Lean Operations at Alaska Airlines (Ch.16): The company’s aggressive implementation of Lean includes its 6-sigma Green Belt training, Kaizen events, Gemba Walks, and 5S applications.

Scheduling Challenges at Alaska Airlines (Module B and Ch.15): Good scheduling of crews and planes means optimization–the perfect fit for our coverage of LP and scheduling.

OM is indeed a centerpiece of Alaska’s success and we think your students will enjoy these videos.

OM in the News: Johns Hopkins’ Capacity Command Center

Johns Hopkins Hospital’s state-of-the-art, advanced hospital control center
Johns Hopkins Hospital’s state-of-the-art, advanced hospital control center

Johns Hopkins Hospital, reports Analytics Magazine (Jan.-Feb., 2017), recently launched an advanced control center to better manage patient safety, experience, volume, and the movement of patients in and out of the hospital. The Capacity Command Center incorporates systems engineering principles, which are commonly seen in aerospace, aviation and power industries, but are rare in hospitals.

In the one room center, 24 staff members work together, equipped with real-time and predictive information, and empowered to take action to prevent or resolve bottlenecks, reduce patient wait time, coordinate services, and reduce risk. The command center also houses a sophisticated system with a wall of computer monitors that provides situational awareness and triggers the center team to take immediate action. During a typical afternoon, the system receives about 500 messages/minute from 14 different hospital IT systems generating real-time data. “In the past, like most hospitals, we were dependent on traditional technology – phones, email and IT systems – to manage the hospital, assign beds, etc.,” says a hospital exec.

The technology in the command center keeps staff members informed 24/7 about when there is an influx of patients coming into the hospital, which hospital units need additional staff members, the status of how many patients are being treated, the need for and availability of beds across the hospital, the highest-priority admissions and discharges, and other essential information.

Early results demonstrate improved patient experience and operational outcomes such as: (1) 60% improvement in the ability to accept patients with complex medical conditions from other hospitals; (2) critical care team is now dispatched 63 minutes sooner to pick up patients arriving in ambulances from other hospitals; (3) patients are assigned a bed 30% faster from the ER; (4) transfer delays from the OR after a procedure have been reduced by 70%; and (5) 21% more patients are now discharged before noon.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Why have hospitals been slow to adopt these process control procedures used in other industries?
  2. What hospital functions could benefit from the command center concept?