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Mar 9, 2010 0

Runaway Prius hits 90 mph before stopping with aid of CHP

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This has all the makings of a disaster and from the looks of it Toyota Corp has the deer in the headlights look. This has all the makings of a PR disaster minus the PR.

The driver of a Toyota Prius who called 911 on Monday to report his accelerator was stuck finally got the car stopped after about 20 minutes with the help of the California Highway Patrol, officers said.

"He was reaching speeds over 90 miles per hour," CHP Officer Larry Landeros said of the driver, James Sikes.
A Toyota spokesman said Monday evening that the company, which has recalled millions of vehicles because of reports of unintended acceleration, was sending a representative to investigate the cause of the incident.

Here’s the video of the story:

I think the situation is reaching the point of breaking and if Toyota designers cannot find the root cause quickly and/or implement a safe workaround until creating a final fix – It does look like Toyota’s reputation notwithstanding TPS is about to careen off a cliff.

But the company was unsure whether Sikes took his car into a Toyota dealer to comply with the recall, Lyons said.

Why? The driver may not have but the company is unsure?

Sep 4, 2008 0

The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing – Part 3 (Final)

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In this final part of my review of The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing, an article that you can find at the IEEE Spectrum site, I mean to go over the capabilities of Fab PowerOps (FPO) and contrast it with the essence/framework that Toyota Production System (TPS) offers. In the earlier two parts, The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing – Part 1: I looked at the core outline of the consulting experience that the researchers (Clayton M. Christensen, Steven King, Matt Verlinden, and Woodward Yang) and in The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing – Part 2: I delved further into the essence of earlier research that identified a few rules distilled from TPS that those researchers (Spear and H. Kent Bowen) claimed describe essential parts of the system that is internalized within the organization primarily as an outcome of iterative growth over the last five decades.
A brief about FPO – What is FPO? FPO is a scheduler for a wafer fab (but it can be extended to other industries as well) – pure and simple. It is a first generation scheduler in its class – the class being (near-)real time optimization (MIP: Mixed Integer Programming) based scheduling. It is rapidly customizable (aren’t they all? No, Seriously!) – it is so customizable that you can swing from one extreme of weighing it down by the whims of those who don’t know any better to direct it to the other extreme of it being light and flexible for those who mean to get certain scheduling behaviors realized and every other point in between. Fast! Now, while some solutions can achieve this as well, for example: "Do activity A if condition B for tool-space C", there are two immediate problems with this approach:
  1. It doesn’t scale very well – multiple statements and overlapping tool-spaces lead to conflicts that must be resolved and accounted for. Otherwise, you’d default to FIFO (First in, first out) or some other simple rule.
  2. Is it the best solution available? Is it a really good solution, good solution, solution, workable solution, bad solution, very bad solution?
It is also highly extensible in the sense that while there is a product architecture, layered on top of it is an customizable interface that a client can write pretty much whatever he wants (i.e in Java) and since the bulk of the product is in Java, it is cross platform compatible as well.

For some of us who might be aware of an SAP or like system that plans out a day in advance, week in advance or maybe even a month in advance, FPO is a breath of fresh air, it generates schedules every five minutes. No, that is not a typo. Every five minutes, FPO accesses the state of the wafer fab (from an MES (Manufacturing Execution System) – it is flexible enough to be hooked up to several MES-es) and computes a schedule for all tools that it is in charge of scheduling. What type of tools? Batch tools, single chamber tools, multi-chamber tools, parallel chamber tools and so on. When things change on the floor within a five minute interval, it becomes a state change that figures into the next computation run or iteration (five minutes later) and the schedules update accordingly taking the event(s) into account – however many events there are. The last piece of this powerful scheduler is access to the data it uses in several transformational states and forms for monitoring, information, review, investigation and continuous improvement.
Now, back to the TPS story, the connection between the consultants and the earlier researchers (Spear and Kent) is that the four rules distilled by Spear and Kent informs some of the questions that are used in the exercise. From, the examples listed in the article:
The first rule, on activities, states that

Oct 22, 2007 2

A useful Lean and Six Sigma Resource

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Manufacturing-Trends is making available a host of free resources (free signup may be required) for your consumption. They are in the form of powerpoint presentations that delve into a myriad set of issues surrounding Lean and Six Sigma. They’ll be well worth your while.

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Jul 31, 2007 0

Ten misconceptions about Lean Manufacturing!!

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From time to time, you get squeezed on every front – the blog has suffered a bit in that time. But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

This chap is turning ONE! That’s my son Sahel and he turned 1 on July 29th this year and we’re having a birthday bash this coming weekend. Its a bash alright and even though he might not remember anything about it, he will sure get to see the photos. And videos as well.

Sahel’s picture

Meanwhile, I came across this article titled – 10 Common Misconceptions about Lean Manufacturing which I found to be quite interesting. #8 picks my fancy because it is an important point about balance:

8. Lean is the elimination of waste. Much of Lean is about getting rid of waste (muda). There is also the elimination of variation (mura) and overburden (muri). Variation can result in overburden, resulting in waste. The elimination of waste is good shorthand for getting rid of the root causes, which include overburden (forcing a system to do something it is not designed to) due to variation (in customer demand, people’s ability, material quality,etc.), in order to build a stronger system.


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Jul 9, 2007 8

Free download of Six Sigma guide

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Manufacturing Trends is making available a free download of an "experts" guide to Six Sigma . I quickly perused it and it looks fine but as always as far as statistical symbols go, a little due diligence is always a good measure. You have to register in order to obtain the download but I think its worth it.

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Jun 12, 2007 0

Training within Industry and Toyota

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A quick note for today. I came across this rather interesting Lean exercise through a Yahoo group. This presentation, by John Shook, is about Training Within Industry (TWI) and how Toyota adapted and developed these methods.I think it fills in some of the blanks of what constitutes some high level overview of how a continuous improvement based system should look like including the famous P-D-C-A (Plan – Do – Check – Act) methodology.

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Jan 22, 2007 1

Toyota plans ultra-inexpensive car

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As reported in the news today, Toyota plans ultra-inexpensive car – Wow!

Toyota Motor Corp. plans to build a low-cost car undercutting Renault’s emerging-market Logan through a “radical” rethink in design and production, the president of the fast-growing Japanese automaker said.

What is the Logan from Renault? (More information available at Wikipedia)

The Renault Logan is the latest car to enter the super budget automobiles, and will compete with the best of the world’s cheapest automobiles.


Renault aims to retail the car for Eur 5000 (about $6105) and the competition that its expected to take on are:

Targets for the Renault Logan include Rover’s CityRover, Kia Picanto, Seat Arosa, Daihatsu Cuore, Daewoo Matiz and shortly the Volkswagen Fox.

So what does Toyota plan in order to take on the competition?

“The focus is on low-cost technology,” Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe told Britain’s Financial Times newspaper in an interview published Monday.
He declined to set a price for a low-cost car but said it would be “at least” less than the Logan.

Like I have said many times before, Toyota may come in above the Logan’s price to begin with in their first iteration but one can’t fault them for knowing what the market would support. And if you’re aiming to compete as the low-cost technology, they will quickly apply their TPS and continuous improvement methodology and push that price lower, lower with every continuing iteration.
Here’s the principal idea outlined by Toyota’s CEO:

Watanabe said that Toyota could slash the price by targetting costs throughout production.
“Everything from design to production methods will be radically changed and we are thinking of a really ultra-low-cost way of designing, using ultra-low-cost materials, even developing new materials if necessary,” he said.

Again, Toyota is focusing on its twin competencies of product design and production rather than advertising and financing to execute their strategy of competing in the low-cost car segment. Also consider their built-up experience in hybrids and whether hybrid power systems will get cheap enough to be put under the hood of a low-cost car.
Needless to say that this announcement will sound a loud boom across the bow of US carmakers.

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About me

I live, work and blog from Newburgh, New York. I work for IBM as a senior consultant in the Fab PowerOps group that works around the issue of detailed Fab (semiconductor fab) level scheduling on a continual basis. My erstwhile company ILOG was recently acquired by IBM and so I've made the transition to the Websphere group.

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