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Runaway Prius hits 90 mph before stopping with aid of CHP

(Chris) Jacob Abraham — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:56:23 +0000

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?

Technorati Tags: Runway Prius,Sticky pedals,Toyota

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

(Chris) Jacob Abraham — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:22:13 +0000

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:

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.
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

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A useful Lean and Six Sigma Resource

(Chris) Jacob Abraham — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:18:01 +0000

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.

Tags: Lean, Six Sigma, Useful resources, Manufacturing-Trends

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Ten misconceptions about Lean Manufacturing!!

(Chris) Jacob Abraham — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:38:26 +0000

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.

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.

Tags: My son turns One, 10 Common Misconceptions about Lean Manufacturing

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Free download of Six Sigma guide

(Chris) Jacob Abraham — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:54:41 +0000

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.

Tags: Six Sigma Manufacturing-Trends Lean Six Sigma

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