Triz Sigma

ASQ offers free outsourcing and supply chain Webinars

With the economy driving organizations to slash budgets — including professional development dollars — the American Society for Quality (ASQ) is offering an opportunity to continue professional growth with two new free on-demand Webinars. The Webinars, titled “Quality in Outsourcing” and “Improving Supply Chain Management,” are available for downloading in the Manufacturing section of the ASQ Web site at www.asq.org/manufacturing/why-quality/overview.html.

Quality in Outsourcing
Senior Quality Manager and Six Sigma Master Black Belt Govind Ramu shares how developing a body of knowledge dedicated to quality in outsourcing will strengthen processes and help companies exceed expectations in today’s global economy.

Improving Supply Chain Management
Tara Holloway of Graham Packaging Company will explain how her organization implemented a supply chain management system that captured actionable information, reduced costs and improved overall process and product quality.

Focus on Executing Key Performance Indicators

“Focus on executing to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).”  This is the key piece of advice for navigating the recession from a top supply chain executive at one of the world’s largest consumer electronics firms (due to confidentiality, I can’t disclose the name of the company). The top-level supply chain KPIs at this company include cost, delivery performance, cash, and quality. These KPIs can be decomposed into lower-level supporting metrics. For example, the cash metric is supported by specific targets for inventory turns, Days Sales Outstanding, and Days Payables Outstanding targets.

Cost

Every year, a major focus for the company is reducing its global supply chain costs. In the first two fiscal quarters of this year, however, cost reductions surpassed the full year target by over 50 percent. Driven by the volatile market conditions, the supply chain team intensified its cost reduction efforts. A Lean Six Sigma program was an important driver in the team exceeding its aggressive cost targets. The company has used Lean Six Sigma processes to reduce portfolio complexity, simplify materials management, and reduce manufacturing cycle times. As an aside, some consultants and supply chain executives have told me that there is more money to be saved in reducing the number of diverse components used across different products than in reducing the number of final products produced. This company’s procurement team delivered material cost improvements that were 40 percent above target despite increased cost pressures stemming from industry wide commodity shortages on certain key components.

Delivery Performance

This company’s manufacturing process is designed with the goal of shipping products within four days of receiving an order. It takes an additional four days to deliver the order through the company’s global logistics supply network (the company’s factories are primarily in Asia, and North America is its biggest market). The company has made impressive improvements on this metric (delivery within eight days to large retail organizations) over the past three years. The global supply chain’s key delivery performance metric is evolving from being based solely on speed to a focus on executing to the first committed ship date. In other words, more reliable manufacturing performance upstream leads to less expediting and fewer heroic efforts downsteam in logistics.

The company has also made IT investments in the global logistics area. Faced with the economic downturn, the global supply chain team established stronger partnerships with fewer logistics service providers and they are in the process of better integrating their IT systems with their 3PL partner’s systems for better collaboration and order status visibility.

Cash

The cash conversion metric is an important KPI for the global supply chain team. A ‘Cash is King’ initiative was established to drive performance not only in the global supply chain organization but also across the sales and finance teams. This end-to-end effort helps to insure that Inventory turns, Days Sales Outstanding, and Days Payables Outstanding targets are met. With the volatile marketplace and customers and suppliers alike going out of business, strengthening the controls on this KPI has proven beneficial to the company’s bottom line. As a result, the global supply chain team has achieved best-in-class performance by improving cash conversion in the first fiscal quarter this year by 13 days compared to the previous year.

Quality

The company employs rigorous quality standards throughout its design and development processes, as well as its manufacturing processes. The first production runs test over 97.5 percent defect free across its product lines. To maintain high quality standards, the global supply chain team focuses closely on:

• An aggressive supplier audit program. The company frequently audits its suppliers’ facilities. These audits examine the manufacturing processes, check to see whether the supplier is working towards achieving the quality standards agreed to in the design review process, and check to insure compliance with local/regional environmental regulations and industry environmental standards.
• Maintaining 100 percent supplier testing and making sure its suppliers understand and adhere to all of its quality standards and processes.

And of course, the original focus of Lean and Six Sigma was quality and the company continues to use these processes for that purpose too.

In conclusion, “during the economic downturn, an intense focus on execution becomes the key to agility, efficiency and turning losses into profits.” While any company can apply these best practices at any time, in an unstable economy, this management approach takes on added emphasis and importance. While the company continues to have weekly meetings, with teams from order processing, procurement, manufacturing and logistics, to focus on the most critical objectives and appropriately balance the different KPIs when they are in conflict, the performance metrics are now also monitored daily in case midweek adjustments need to be made.

Businesses take to Twitterlytics for clues

BANGALORE: Call it Twitter Analytics, or simply Twitterlytics . A number of companies are beginning to analyse Twitter feeds to understand what consumers are saying about their products and brands. 24/7 Customer has already got some 200 clients for a Twitter research and strategy tool that it launched barely two months ago.

The clients include companies like Adobe, Symantec , Barclays, Time Warner, British Gas, JP Morgan Chase, Vodafone, Citi, Plaxo and T-Mobile.

The Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) says it has been using Twitter extensively as a feedback channel to continuously improve services. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki talked in Bangalore recently about how companies like Comcast are scanning Twitter to identify problems customers are facing and resolving them before they become big issues, and how Virgin America uses it to engage with customers.

Twitter has become the most handy tool for people to convey their feelings to the rest of the world. So, if a laptop you are using suddenly crashes, you can fish out your mobile phone and tweet an angry message about the laptop brand. If you find a new restaurant serving amazing food, you can immediately pass on that info to all your Twitter followers, many of who may retweet it to their followers.

And that’s exactly what millions are doing, which is why companies see it as a great tool to understand what proactive steps they need to take to ensure a problem does not get worse, or how they can sustain a successful brand. “These (tweets) seem to be the most genuine feedback which we can act upon due to the format and objectivity on services and amenities ,” says Anjana Kher Murray of BIAL.

V Bharathwaj, chief marketing officer of 24/7 Customer, echoes that: “The consumer voice is most dominant on Twitter, far more than in Facebook or any other social media.”

BIAL’s got positive tweets like this recent one from Twitterer Dave Evans, “BIAL has amazing security check-in (10 min) and bag claim (7 min) standards. It’s a pleasure to fly through.” As also negative ones, such as this from Shayonpal: “A cab ride from the bangalore airport to koramangala is 1100 bucks?”

Murray says BIAL realized from tweets that people often missed the airport’s laptop charging points. “So we made those signs more prominent. Social media also helped us to address issues like cheating by taxis and touts,” she says.

24/7 Customer’s solution, which it calls 24/7tweetview , automates the entire analysis process, and provides a comprehensive view of what is being said about a company or a brand on Twitter at an aggregate level. It can give you the number of times you are mentioned in tweets for any period of your choice and help you see how these numbers are changing. You can see which geographies the tweets are coming from, and from which source — whether desktop PC or mobile or some other. “Companies also get an insight about the overall sentiment about their product /brand on Twitter, both in terms of positive and negative tones,” says Mohit Jain, chief innovation officer of 24/7 Customer, one of India’s leading BPOs.

While all of those are freely available, there’s also a paid-for category, where companies can get information on what topics their product is being discussed about, and greater insights about the source of the problem or areas of popularity. The company also has domain experts to provide suggestions to the client based on the research. Many Twitter tools have emerged in the past year, but mostly related to user analytics.

Twitalyzer analyses a Twitter user’s activities and influence on others. Twitturly tracks popular URLs on Twitter. Microplaza aggregates and organizes links shared by those you follow on Twitter. 24/7’s tool appears to be one of the early business-to-business ones. The company plans to provide a service that will even enable companies to respond to individual complaints.

Source- Economictimes.com

A journey through the Earth’s climate history

As world leaders prepare to meet in Copenhagen to discuss climate change - how did the Earth’s climate arrive at its current state and how do scientists delve into the secrets of our planet’s past?

The layers of ice laid down each year in Antarctica and Greenland store a record of the Earth’s climate. Bubbles of air trapped in the ice as it froze can be analysed to give details on temperature at the time it froze, and on atmospheric concentrations of gases.

The oldest ice core so far extracted belongs to the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (Epica). It allows scientists to look back 800,000 years.

Over time, the Earth’s orbit around the Sun varies slightly. This changes the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth’s surface, alternately warming and cooling the planet’s surface.

In a warming phase, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are released from the ice and amplify the warming - increasing the natural greenhouse effect. They are stored again when an ice age starts.

So over this period, we see temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations changing in step, in cycles lasting about 100,000 years.

About 10,000 years ago, the Earth emerged from its most recent ice age. Agriculture developed, and the extra food supported a growing global population.

The last 1,000 years saw development of international trade - and eventually, in the 1700s, the birth of the Industrial Revolution. This ran largely on coal and later, oil.

The human population was also growing, reaching one billion around the start of the 19th Century.

By this time, a growing network of weather stations was taking daily measurements of temperature, a record that increases in precision as time goes on.

In the 20th Century, fuel use, industry, land clearance and agriculture all increased atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The temperature curve for the last 100 years shows two distinct periods of warming with an intervening period of cooling around 1940, probably caused by increased industrial emissions of aerosols, tiny particles that reflect sunlight.

In the second half of the century, highly accurate measurements, taken initially in Hawaii and Antarctica, proved that carbon dioxide concentrations were steadily rising in a regular manner. Other greenhouse gases such as methane showed similar trends.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes it is more than 90% probable that the warming seen in the second half of the 20th Century is mainly driven by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Source - BBC