http://www.pddnet.com/blogs/2013/04/unleashing-engineering-creativity-concept-fans

http://www.pddnet.com/articles/2013/03/unleashing-engineering-creativity

http://www.pddnet.com/articles/2013/04/unleashing-engineering-creativity-nine-screens

http://www.pddnet.com/blogs/2013/03/unleashing-engineering-creativity-kano-model

http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=262284&page_number=2

http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1365&doc_id=260565

It’s all interesting material, and it’s all related to finding innovative solutions to product and process creativity challenges.

Enjoy!

In this latest book we explore the best techniques for stimulating creative thinking, creating new products, improving existing products, and solving design challenges.  Surprisingly, even those of us who are paid to be creative often need help.  Most of us lose much of our natural creativity by the time we finish high school, but we can regain it through the techniques included in Unleashing Engineering Creativity.  This is exciting and fun material, and Unleashing Engineering Creativity presents it in an interesting and engaging manner.

Many organizations and engineers rely on brainstorming as their primary creative and inventive tool, but this simplistic approach often fails to stimulate creativity in a meaningful way.  Unleashing Engineering Creativity goes far beyond brainstorming.  This book explores powerful new creativity stimulation approaches and provides recommendations for overcoming self-imposed obstacles.   The title says it all.  If you want to unleash your engineering creativity, this book will help you and your organization attain significant creativity improvements.

I bought the Lutz book a few months ago when I saw it in an airport while I was on my way to Thailand to present a Manufacturing Leadership course.  Bob Lutz is a certifiable gearhead with the credentials and experience to back it up…he’s held very senior positions with Ford, BMW, Chrysler, and General Motors.  The book is mostly about GM, a company that rehired Lutz to help the company find its way again…which is another way of saying that Lutz’s new job was to conceive, develop, and make GM cars people would want.

A bit of history on this first…in the 1950s and 1960s, GM was ahead of the world in producing exciting cars.  Think 1955 Chevys, the Pontiac GTO, the Corvette, the Olds Toronado and Cadillac El Dorado, the 1959 Coupe de Ville, the SS 396 Chevelle, the El Camino, the Camaro, the Buick Riviera, and, well, you get the idea. It was the golden age for American automobiles and GM was at the top of the heap. Then the company lost its way, and the cars GM cranked out in the mid-70s and beyond were just awful.

Lutz explains that the reason GM fell from glory was not just the financial folks (the “bean counters” of the book’s title), but its pre-occupation with committee-based design efforts that bred a culture of mediocrity.  He makes a strong case for strong-willed leaders who design cars based on their instincts and a connection with the product, not what cost reduction, producibility, and all of the other “ilities” committees will approve.

The good news is that GM is on the way back, and I think you can see that in their new cars. I especially like what’s being offered by Cadillac and Chevy.   I drive a Z-06 and in my opinion there’s nothing more exciting.  It’s American made and it has the right style and sound.

The next book that I have even stronger feelings about is The Gun, by C.J. Chivers.  I was surprised that I hadn’t heard of this book before when I read a review in the New York Times.   The New York Times is about as left-leaning a rag as ever existed and it had high praise for The Gun.   I reasoned that if the leftist Bloomberg lackies liked it, there had to be something there, so I went to Amazon and bought a copy.

The Times was right, but for the wrong reasons.

My impression is that the Times guys did little more than read the press release for The Gun, as all they really mentioned in their review was that the book told the story of the AK-47′s proliferation after the Soviet empire disintegrated.  The AK-47, of course, is the Kalashnikov-designed assault rifle that has become an iconic communist/terrorist/insurgency weapon.  The Gun makes the point that after the Soviet empire fell all eyes were on securing the Soviet nuclear arsenal, yet no Soviet nuclear weapon had ever killed anyone.  AK-47 rifles, however, were all over the world, and they had killed many people.   The production quantities were such that the Soviets could have issued 700 AK-47s to each of their soldiers.  They didn’t do that for obvious reasons…instead, the rifles proliferated and wound up in the hands of terrorists and other low-lifes all over the world.

While the above is interesting, it’s not what The Gun is all about.   The book should perhaps have been titled The Guns, because what it focuses on are the differences between the AK-47 and the US weapon designed in response to it…the M-16.   That, folks, is a fascinating story, and Chivers’ telling of it is masterful.   The producibility, reliability, and engineering tradeoffs made by Colt and Kalashnikov for each of these weapons are fascinating.  Colt focused on accuracy and precision, which made the early M-16s unreliable and less battle-worthy.   The AK-47 focused on reliability, low cost, easy producibility, and just enough accuracy to make the weapon deadly.   In the early Vietnam War days, there’s no question that the AK-47 was a superior rifle.   Chivers’ explanations and comparisons of these two rifles make for great reading, and we use The Gun in our failure analysis, cost reduction, manufacturing leadership, and engineering creativity courses for just that reason.

If your company has ever struggled with shipping products on schedule, this book cuts through all the theory and software mysticism the MRP and ERP companies push…it’s what you need to know if you want to eliminate your delinquencies and stay on schedule.  It’s also the book we’ll be using in the University of Kansas online Manufacturing Performance course series, and you can learn more about the KU program right here.

Common approaches for tolerance selection include the following:

• In some organizations, tolerances are based on the nominal dimension.  Dimensions up to 1 inch might get a tolerance of ± 0.001 inch, dimensions up to 5 inches might get a tolerance of ± 0.01 inch, and everything above 5 inches might get a tolerance of ± 0.05 inch.  This makes the designer’s work easy, but it is a poor practice.
• In some organizations, tolerances are based on decimal places.  If the designer specifies a nominal dimension of, say, 1.000 inch (3 decimal places), the tolerance for might be ± .001 inch (all 3-decimal-place dimensions are assigned a ± .001 inch tolerance).  If the designer specifies a nominal dimension of 1.00 inch (2 decimal places), the tolerance is ± .01 inch.  The tolerances are restricted to fixed steps, and it’s not likely the steps correspond to fit, function, or process capabilities.
• In some cases, designers assign tight tolerances to parts in an effort to improve quality.  This practice is misguided and builds unnecessary cost into the product.
• In some cases, the designers assess how the parts fit together, what the parts have to do, and how the parts will be manufactured, and base the tolerances on these factors.

That last approach is the best approach.  Based on our observations of many organizations, though, it’s not what usually happens.

Cost Reduction Opportunities

The best point for reducing cost is during the design process.   A good approach is to include the manufacturing folks in the design process, assess the production approach as designs emerge, and identify processes and process capabilities for each part.  It’s the engineering organization’s responsibility to select dimensions and assign tolerances that will assure fit and function; it’s the manufacturing organization’s responsibility to raise a red flag where tight tolerances mandate expensive processes or a high likelihood of nonconformances.

If you didn’t do the above during the design process any you have tightly-toleranced parts in production, you can still reduce cost by targeting unnecessarily-tight tolerances.  Here’s a recommended approach:

• Talk to your QA and manufacturing people.   They’ll be able to identify parts and dimensions that cause frequent rejections.   Where this situation exists, evaluate relaxing the tolerances.
• Look for “use as is” dispositions on nonconforming parts (trust me on this…your manufacturing people will know where this is occurring).  If a “use as is” disposition is the acceptable, it’s likely the tolerance on the nonconforming dimension can be relaxed.
• Talk to your purchasing folks.   They can reach out to the supplier community and ask the same kinds of questions.   This is a particularly important area to explore, because in most manufacturing organizations approximately 70% of the cost of goods sold flows through the purchasing organization.  You may not know without asking how many parts your suppliers are rejecting; all you’ll see are the costs buried in what you have to pay for the parts.   The best way to ask the question is the most direct:   What are we doing that’s driving your costs?  The suppliers know, and they’re usually eager to answer the question.

All of the above is associated with cost reduction, but that’s not the only place where inappropriately-toleranced parts create problems.  In many cases, dimensioning and tolerancing practices can induce system-level failures.    That’s another fascinating area, and we’ll address it in a future blog entry.

Would you like to know more about cost reduction opportunities you act on right now?  Consider our cost reduction training programs, or take a look at our most recent book, Cost Reduction and Optimization for Manufacturing and Industrial Companies!

• Zero defects (that one made a few guys in Winter Haven wealthy)
• TQM (does anyone use that term any more?)
• 6σ (we are fascinated by Greek letters and martial arts belts)
• 5 Whys (hey, why not?)
• 5S (in both English and Japanese, no less!)
• Lean (perhaps picking up on our anti-obesity predilection?)

And many, many more. You get the idea.

Over the last three or four decades I’ve watched all of the above with some detachment and great amusement.  Much of what’s included in these programs is the same; the titles are simply new wrappings around old ideas.  But the old ideas still make sense.  Process improvement.  Scrap reduction. Clean workplaces.  Reduced setup times.  Straight-line manufacturing.  The list goes on.  My challenge to you is this: Find something in any of the above programs that didn’t originate in basic manufacturing/industrial management concepts…concepts that go all the way back to the Industrial Revolution and Frederick Taylor.  I’d be interested in hearing your comments.

The above notwithstanding, I’d like to weigh in with a program of my own.  I’ve thought about this a lot. It’s got to be simple.  It needs a Greek letter to lend an air of the esoteric and perhaps make it sound needlessly scientific (although I promise you, it won’t be either).  It needs to offer a catchy way to package Mr. Taylor’s key concepts.  It needs to be marketable.  And it needs to be focused on improving manufacturing, quality, and profitability.

Here we go:  7 Pi.

Yep. I originally started out with 6P, but then I realized I was leaving out an important P, and P didn’t sound as cool as Pi, or π.  π, as you know, is the Greek letter for P.

About now, as you’re reading this, you’re probably wondering what this is all about.  The focus here is delivery performance improvement, or getting and staying on schedule as a manufacturer.  If you’ve ever run a plant that was behind schedule, you know how tough life can be.  And if your plant is on schedule, you know that quality and profitability are going to be okay (trust me on this, I’ve seen it happen in the plants I’ve run and in the ones I’ve advised).  Staying on schedule is critical.  If you can do that, everything else falls into place.  And if you do everything you need to do to be on schedule, everything is in place.

So, here we go…the 7 Pi’s for delivery performance improvement:

• People
• Product
• Process
• Procurement
• Productivity
• Production Control
• caPacity

I know, I fudged it a little on that last one, but that’s the only bit of artistic license I’ll take here.  Watch the ManufacturingTraining blog, folks, because we’re going to explore each of our 7π’s in the coming weeks!

Enjoy; I know I sure did!

ManufacturingTraining and the University of Kansas have finalized the course schedule for our next series of six online Manufacturing Optimization courses:

• Delivery Performance Improvement:  21 August 2012
• Cost Estimation:  16 October 2012
• Industrial Statistics:  8 January 2013
• Quality Management:  5 March 2013
• Root Cause Failure Analysis:  30 April 2013
• Cost Reduction and Optimization:  25 June 2013

Each course is 3 weeks long and the University of Kansas will grant Continuing Education credit.  We’ll meet for online lectures twice each week, with interactive assignments and discussion board activities following the lectures.  We’ll be posting more information here and on the ManufacturingTraining.com website in the near future, so stay tuned for more information on this exciting new professional education opportunity!  In the meantime, if you want advance information on pre-enrolling, you can do by shooting an email to info@ManufacturingTraining.com.

An Apache Rotor Blade Bond Joint

The photo above shows a bonded section of an AH-64A Apache helicopter main rotor blade in the area where you see the blue Dykem. It’s where the blade manufacturer and the Army experienced numerous disbonds, and it’s the problem the blade manufacturer had to solve.

An AH-64A Apache at Fort Knox, Kentucky

Before delving into the failure analysis, let’s consider the Apache rotor blade’s design and its history. The Apache helicopter has what are arguably the most advanced rotor blades in the world. They can take a direct hit from a 23mm ZSU-23/4 high explosive warhead and remain intact. During the Vietnam war, a single rifle bullet striking a Huey blade would take out the helicopter and everyone on board. When the Army wrote the specifications for the Apache, they wanted a much more survivable and much less vulnerable blade.

Vietnam-Era Huey Helicopters 

The Apache helicopter prime contractor designed a composite blade with four redundant load paths running the entire rotor blade length. The blade’s advanced design uses titanium, special stainless steels, and honeycomb, but those four redundant load paths were the key to its survivability. If one section of the blade took a hit with a 23mm warhead detonation, the three remaining load paths held the blade together. That actually happened once during the first Persian Gulf war, and the Apache helicopter made it back to its base. It’s an awesome design, but it had a production weakness.

Apache Rotor Blade Sectional View Showing Four Spars 

Let’s also consider the nature of the Apache production approach. Three entities are important here: The US Army (the Apache customer), the prime contractor (who designed the helicopter and its blade), and the blade manufacturer. The blade manufacturer was a built-to-print manufacturing organization. They built the blade in accordance with the helicopter prime contractor’s technical data package.

The manufacturing process consisted of laying up the blade in a cleanroom environment using special fixturing, bagging the blade components in a sealed environment, pulling a vacuum on the bag, transporting the blade to an autoclave, and then autoclave curing.  The autoclave cure was rigidly controlled in accordance with the prime contractor’s specification.

During production startup, many of the blades had a high rejection rate after the autoclave cure. The bond joint (where the stainless steel longitudinal spars overlapped, as shown in our photo above) frequently disbonded.  Eager to get the blade into production, the blade manufacturer, the prime contractor, and the Army pushed ahead.  They believed that due to the “state of the art” nature of the Apache blade’s design, a less-than-100% yield was inherent to the process.  The disbond failures continued into production.  To cut to the chase, the blade manufacturer continued producing the blade for the next decade with an approximate 50% rejection rate.  To make matters worse, blades in service on Apache helicopters only had about an 800-hour service life (the specification called for a 2,000-hour service life).

By any measure, this was not a good situation.  The blade manufacturer had attempted to find the disbond root cause off and on for about 10 years, with essentially no success. While not happy, the Army continued to buy replacement blades, and they continued to send blades back to the prime contractor from the field for depot repairs.  The prime contractor sent the blades back to the blade manufacturer.  In retrospect, neither the prime contractor nor the blade manufacturer were financially motivated to fix the disbond problem.

After a change in ownership, the blade manufacturer realized the in-house blade disbond rework costs were significant. The new management was serious about finding and correcting the blade disbonds. Using fault-tree-analysis-based root cause analysis techniques, the company identified literally hundreds of potential failure causes. The failure analysis team found and corrected many problems in the production process, but none had induced the blade disbonds.  The failures continued. Surprisingly (or perhaps not surprisingly, considering the lively spares and repair business), the helicopter prime contractor did not seem particularly interested in correcting the problem.

After ruling out hundreds of hypothesized failure causes, one of the remaining suspect causes was the bondline width where the longitudinal spars were bonded together. That’s the distance marked on the macro photo with scribe marks on the blue Dykem (the photo I showed you earlier, and the one at the top of this blog entry).  During a meeting with the helicopter prime contractor, the blade manufacturer asked if the bondline width was critical. The prime contractor, evasive at first, finally admitted that this distance was indeed critical. The prime contractor further admitted that if the distance was allowed to go below 0.440 inch, a disbond was likely.

Armed with this information, the blade manufacturer immediately analyzed the prime contractor’s build-to-print rotor blade drawings.  To their surprise, tolerance analysis showed the blade’s design allowed the bondline width to go as low as 0.330 inch. The blade manufacturer inspected all failed blades in house, and found that every one of the failed blades was, in fact, below 0.330 inch.  It was an amazing discovery.

The blade manufacturer immediately asked the prime contractor to change the drawings such that the bondline width would never go below 0.440 inch. The prime contractor refused, most likely fearing a massive claim from the blade manufacturer for a technical data package deficiency spanning several years.  The prime contractor instead accused the blade manufacturer of a quality lapse, stating that this was what allowed the bondline width to go below the 0.440 inch dimension.

The blade manufacturer explained the results of their tolerance analysis again, and once again pointed out that the blade design permitted the disbond-inducing condition. When the prime contractor refused to concede the point (and again accused the blade manufacturer of a quality lapse), the blade manufacturer took a different tack.  As repair facility, the blade manufacturer had blades in house for depot repairs from various points during the Apache program’s life (including the 12th ever blade built, which went back to the first year of production). All of these earlier failed blades had the same problem: They conformed to the technical data package, but their bondline width was below 0.440 inch.

The blade manufacturer, faced with an ongoing 50% rejection rate, decided to hold the blade’s components to much tighter tolerances than required by the prime contractor’s technical data package. By doing so, the blade manufacturer produced conforming blades with bondline widths above 0.440 inch. After implementing this change, the blade disbond rejection rate essentially went to zero.

So what’s the message here?  There are several:

1. Don’t accept that you have to live with yields less than 100%. You can focus on finding and fixing a failure’s root cause if you are armed with the right tools. Don’t accept the “state of the art” argument as a reason for living with ongoing yield issues.
2. Don’t think that simply because the product meets the design (i.e., there are no nonconformances) that everything is good. In many cases, the cause of a recurring failure is design related. Finding and addressing these deficiencies is often a key systems failure analysis outcome.
3. If you are a build-to-print contractor, be wary.  The design agency may not always be completely open to revealing design deficiencies.
4. It’s easy to become complacent and accept a less-than-100% yield as a necessary fact of life. In some cases, the yield is not just a little below 100%; it’s dramatically less than 100% (as occurred on the Apache rotor blade production program for many years).
5. There are significant savings associated with finding and fixing recurring nonconformances. You can do it if you want to, and if you have the right tools.

You know, the wild thing about this failure and the Mast Mounted Sight failure mentioned a week or so ago is that the two companies making these different products were literally across the street from each other.  The Mast Mounted Sight was a true show stopper…it stopped production and it probably delayed the start of Operation Desert Storm.  The Apache blade didn’t stop production…it was just a nagging, long-term, expensive rework driver for the Army and the blade manufacturer.  Which one was more expensive?  Beats me, but if I had to guess, I’d guess that the ongoing (but non-show-stopping) nature of the Apache rotor blade failures carried a heftier price tag.

Do you have recurring inprocess failures that you’d like to kill?  Give us a call at 909 204 9984…we can help you equip your people with the tools you need to address these cost and quality drivers!

Our grandson has several invitations to visit colleges, and I was wondering if you could send a short list of the most important questions he should ask.

That’s a wonderful question.   Just in case any of you have a similar situation with a child or grandchild going through the college selection process, let me share with you (from the perspective of an insider) what I think any student ought to know when considering a college:

Question 1:  How long does it take to get a Bachelor’s degree?

Many schools have stretched this out to 5 or 6 years, which I think is deplorable.   It ought to take 4 years to get a 4-year degree.  If a student wants to take longer because he or she has to work to pay their way through school, that’s okay.  If the university makes it difficult to get required classes, though, that’s shameful.

Question 2:  In my field of study, what’s the placement rate at graduation?

Many students select fields of study that are literally worse than useless in the sense that their majors hurt them (rather than help them) when they seek employment.  I’m not saying that these fields shouldn’t be taught; I am saying that students need to think about what they can do with their degree.   How well the school prepares a student for finding a job should be a critical factor in the selection process.

Question 3:  What percent of the faculty has practical work experience outside the classroom?

Teachers who have never done anything except teach can’t bring real-world experience to the classroom.   Many schools use adjunct faculty members with full-time industry jobs, and teachers who consult to industry outside the classroom.   This kind of practical experience adds an important dimension to any education.

Question 4:   Which department teaches writing? 

This question is particularly important for students who are engineering or science majors.  If the engineering or science department teaches its own writing classes, the training will probably be much more useful.  If the English department teaches these classes, students will graduate knowing a bit about Shakespeare, but they probably won’t know how organize a proposal or how to select appropriate illustrations for a technical report.  Make no mistake, writing is a critical skill, and any engineer or scientist who graduates with inadequate training in this area is graduating with a serious professional handicap.

Question 5:    How many office hours do the professors make available to students each week?

You’ll want this number to be high.   Students can’t pick up everything they’ll need from lectures, and from my experience, being able to visit with professors and ask questions is critical.