I just realized that I don’t subject you to Canadian humour enough. Since you don’t know what you’re missing, here are the 12 days of Christmas, Bob and Doug McKenzie style!
Category Archives: Miscellaneous
Another Headline from the Land of D’Oh! Parallel Picking Improves Order Picking Efficiency
Let’s see. One order at a time. Ten orders at a time. I wonder which methodology is better?
But seriously, parallel picking, done right, is always going to be better than serial picking. The issue is, how do you do it right? An efficient parallel operation is going to not only have multiple people picking orders at the same time, but multiple people picking multiple orders at the same time.
But which way is best? Does each person run around picking multiple orders at the same time, collecting multiple items from each zone to minimize their steps? Or is each individual assigned to a zone and required to find all of the items in the zone for all orders being processed and bring them to a central area for packing?
And if you use the latter method, how do you insure that an order is packed as soon as all items are available? How do you simplify the packer’s task of finding the right item if items from multiple orders are continually poring in? How do you prevent the pickers from getting in each others way if they are converging from all over the warehouse to a small central location? How do you make sure the packers aren’t overwhelmed with too much product at once or underwhelmed with too little product at once? Those are the real questions, and the ones that went unanswered in this article in “parallel picking” in Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
Keeping Your Industrial Control System Secure
Recently, the evil hackers have stepped up their assault with the design of viruses designed specifically to attack and exploit industrial control systems, including the Stuxnet worm specifically written to attack Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, and, according to reports, Siemens control systems in particular.
As a result, you need to step up your efforts to secure your systems. How do you go about it? Start with the advice in this recent article in Industry Week that gives you “five keys to keep your industrial control system secure”.
- Develop Security Awareness
Viruses don’t just come from the internet. They also come from flash & USB drives that were infected on another computer. Be sure to install end-to-end anti-virus solutions and only copy / run new software after it has been scanned and determined to be virus free. - Do a Risk Assessment
Determine the risk posed by each organizational system and lock it down appropriately. Mission critical systems or systems that control dangerous process or use dangerous materials should be locked down, and, if at all possible, taken completely off the internet. - Find the Legacy Systems
Some of these systems might be so old that they are no longer supported. As a result, they’ll be especially vulnerable to new exploits as there will be no future patches to plug the holes and newer AV products will not support the legacy systems. - Triple Lock-down the Wireless Networks
Now that Blackberries, iPhones, and Android devices can be used to control your network, the last thing you want is an open network that anyone with the right software and a mobile smartphone can use to log in locally and take control. - Communicate
Talk to the IT people and keep abreast of the emerging security issues and have a plan to deal with them before they have their way with you.
Then do the following:
- Lock down any output/display-only devices tighter than Fort Knox.
Disable the USB / external drives, prevent installation of unauthorized programs downloaded over the internet, and make sure the approved anti-virus/anti-spyware programs can’t be disabled. It won’t prevent every threat, but it will prevent known threats from getting in and making more holes that other threats could exploit. - Do a regular security audit at least quarterly.
You can’t just update your anti-virus programs once a year and assume everything is A-OK. Every install, every update, every new machine and new device is a risk. While you don’t need to go psycho and lock everything down and run a level 5 security threat assessment every week, you should run a basic set of scans and penetration tests once a quarter to make sure you or your staff haven’t inadvertently opened the back door wide open.
Finding the Right Site
A recent article in Strategy + Business on five factors for finding the right site (registration required*) hit the mark when it said that many companies choose particular locales as the homes of new engineering, R&D, and design sites for all the wrong reasons. For example, as the article points out, executive proximity, factory location, and global trends are not necessarily good examples. Neither are unemployment rates (which could signal large available labour pools, but which could also signal a lack of necessary skills and education), favorable currency exchange (as currency fluctuates over time, or climate (as being warm year round doesn’t mean anything unless you’re building a tourist resort).
Choosing a future engineering or R&D location should not be a seat-of-the-pants decision. Since sites can’t be spun up or shut down quickly, these decisions have long term consequences and must be made with care. Each of the relevant C’s need to be carefully considered before a decision is made. According to the article, there are five (5) C’s that need to be considered, but I believe that there are six (6).
While I wholeheartedly agree that the following five factors need to be considered:
- Cost
What is the total cost of the location, including the costs of land, office equipment, communications, wages, training, taxes, infrastructure, and wages. etc. - Capacity
What is the current availability of talent in the region and the expected availability in years to come? etc. - Capability
What percentage of the talent has the specific engineering skills that the company needs (and/or can be easily trained to acquire those skills) and how easy will it be to find the talent to build and maintain the appropriate operational environments? etc. - Communications
What will be the ability to seamlessly share information between the site and headquarters without cultural, language, or distance obstacles? etc. - Culture
What is the ability of the location to attract talent that will fit in with the company culture? etc.
I believe that this factor is equally important:
- Competition
How many similar companies are setting up in the region? If too few companies consider the region, it may be difficult for the region to get the “critical mass” necessary for the region to be taken seriously as a producer of products and/or services in your industry. If too many companies are setting up in the region, it could cause costs to skyrocket while capacity shrinks and capability becomes too scarce to support a new entrant.
The authors might argue that “competition” is taken into account by the other factors, and capacity and capability in particular, and that, for this reason, it does not need to be considered on its own, but I would have to disagree. It’s true that capacity and capability will be affected by competition, because more competition will create more demand which will likely result in more educational programs being tailored to meet that demand, but the creation and customization of these programs takes time. As a result, competition can exist before there is capacity to serve it. Plus, once these programs are established, educational institutions are slow to change or discontinue them. As a result, some programs will continue to churn out large number of graduates in a certain field long after the demand for those graduates has subsided. Thus, there is no direct correlation between capacity and competition, as there is no direct correlation between capacity and demand for that capacity, and competition must be considered separately.
Finally, if one uses these six Cs (the five Cs in the article augmented with competition), it is reasonable to expect that her chances of finding the right site for expansion are greatly improved. For more details on the first five C’s, including some good examples of how to apply the principles in practice, read the S+B article on five factors for finding the right site (registration required*) in its entirety. There’s a lot more information in it than one can summarize in a short blog post and it is definitely worth your time.
* or subscription required
If These Are The Two Categories Of Procurement At Your Company …
- Things you don’t want
- Things you’re not allowed to buy
… then you are doing it wrong.
Many, many, many thanks to Scott Adams for creating this wonderful strip, found at Dilbert.com, that explains the rationale for these two classic Procurement categories.