Recent reading in batches

The benefits of batching the news.

The benefits of incrementalism.

The benefits of grocery shopping more frequently.

Assembling the Sears and Roebuck catalog, 1942

Cruise ship lean

 Changeover times a zillion: a 6,000 passenger cruise ship comes into port for a same-day turnaround. A great article about the logistics of changeover for the biggest cruise ships in the world. Some excerpts about eliminating motion, transport and waiting waste:

To prevent long immigration control lines from forming, departures are staggered over a few hours. Passengers begin to leave their cabins about 7 a.m. and must be off the ship by 10:30 a.m. The main bottleneck is juggling the flow of bags. Passengers are handed color-coded tags for their luggage, which is collected the night before the ship reaches the port.

The ship recently received four out of five stars on CruiseCritics.com for the whole trip; the embarkation process was rated five out of five by most reviewers

They also figured out a way to clean rooms faster by borrowing from techniques used in auto manufacturing. The company conducted time and motion studies on their workers to identify where they could be more efficient.

On turnaround day, they have a precise list of tasks to perform. They first take out the dirty linen and towels and line them up in the hallways in green and red bags. The efficiency specialists decided that bedsheets and towels should be separated before they are sent to the laundry room.

Attendants work alone, except when they fit new sheets to the beds, when they pair up. That task should take three to five minutes at most, said Edna Pli, the head housekeeper. Thanks to this precise flow, 189 housekeepers can get more than 2,700 rooms ready by noon.

Hat tip to my friend Bill W who is engineering a sculpture for the sister ship. It's similar to this one his company Hypersonic did in Massachussets.

Batching Check

One myth about lean is that it perfects processes so well you don't need to check for accuracy. Wrong. It'd be nice if it did, but it doesn't. The checking station doesn't go away. It just stops being a station. Instead you check everywhere, all the time.

Here's an analogy that might help explain what I mean. 

Let's say you're out shopping. Something costs $35 and you pay $40. You get change. You count it. You have $4. You correct the clerk and they give you another dollar. You go to the next store, pay for something, count the change, correct it if it needs correcting, and so on.

This seems totally normal because we all do it every day. Now imagine another scenario where you didn't count your change at each stop. Instead you waited till you got home and then counted all the change from all the shops to see if you had the right amount.

That's batching. That's what we do now in production at the check station by batch checking the pickers. It's also — sneak preview, thanks Betty! — something we're looking at eliminating next year.

I see batches: CVS Delivery

There's a CVS on my block that gets deliveries in a big batch once a week on Mondays. Here's today's. A fifty-five foot truck parks on the street and the trailer's lift loader drops pallet after pallet onto the sidewalk. It blocks the street for hours as people and hi-los wait for each other to pass and the crew sort the boxes to check them in.

Every other shop in my neighborhood gets these kinds of deliveries multiple times a week, some multiple times a day. The small batch deleveries take minutes, not hours, since they can be tossed off the back of a truck onto a hand cart and wheeled directly into the store to be checked in immediately by the regular crew, not a special Mondays-only check-in team.

These are CVS's operational problems, which are painful enough to contemplate. The deeper problem, to me, happens inside the shop with the customers. CVS's shelves always look half empty. That's because 50% of the time I visit the week is half done and the shelves are picked over, waiting till next Monday's delivery.

Bigger batches lead to more out of stocks. This is one of Lean's counter-intuitive learnings. Its remedy: order less. They key is to order less more frequently, so you can respond to demand. Do that and you'll be in stock more often.

Don't frequent deliveries cost more? Maybe, in some cases. (With all the extra equipment and check in time I see down the street each week at CVS I'm pretty sure the answer is "No" for them.) But ignore cost for a moment. More frequent deliveries mean items are in stock more often. That means you make more sales. In other words, more frequent deliveries increase sales. This lean thing is not just powerful for improving process and the bottom line, but for improving sales and the top line, too.

I see batches: The Death Star

  

 

In Star Wars the Empire batched their military like crazy. For example, they created the Death Star. Like most batching, it was probably sold in a meeting with the Emperor as "an efficient choice." After all, why do lots of small attacks one at a time when you can do them all at once out of a laser beam as big as a planet?

We all know how that story goes. A typically tragic tale of batching. One mistake—that thermal exhaust port—was multiplied by a zillion.

More on batches here.

This is how the phone call goes when you have to tell your boss the Death Star blew up.

I see batches: Nuclear Power

  

In lean operations terminology a "batch" happens when you're not producing something one at a time. It's when you make multiples of something identical all at once. Usually batching is done to be more "efficient," efficiency being defined as the lowest production cost per unit.

Like binge drinking (another form of batching), batches have strange side effects. One is that when things go wrong they go really wrong. Any error is multiplied by the size of the batch. The bigger the batch, the bigger the error.

You can spot batches everywhere. For example, electricity is often created in large batches. Whether it's made from coal, natural gas, or hydroelectricity, almost all electricity is made in the biggest batch possible. And nuclear power plants are the biggest batchers of them all. It's not one home making electricity for itself. It's one plant making electricity for multiple cities. A typical nuclear plant produces enough power for nearly a million homes.

The nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan made me think about batches and how, when you batch radioactive power generation, you can create some horrific errors, multiplied.