Generating Renewable Oil

San Francisco based Solazyme may have the answer to the future of fuel. Many of the companies working to generate oil from algae or other photosynthetic organisms have huge inputs of water or take up vast tracts of land. As mentioned in a post last month, the University of Texas is placing a large bet on algae, which they are “farming” in large tubes instead of open ponds to reduce land use and water consumption. Other companies have focused on ethanol derived from corn. Solazyme takes a “variety of different feedstocks” such as cellulosic materials, switch grass, wood chips, and sugar cane and feeds it to algae instead of sunlight, which according to co-founder Harrison Dillon is 1,000 times more productive than making oil from algae using sunlight.

See the video below for an overview of the company’s efforts and products.

The company has already worked with United Airlines, which recently flew the first commercial flight in the United

States using the their bio-fuel blend. Solazyme’s “unique technology transforms low-cost plant sugars into . . . high-value renewable oils.” This conversion of “low-cost plant sugars” into oil represents an important component of fuels from plant material. One of the biggest issues with biofuels today derives from the use of food-based plant material to produce oil, thereby creating a conflict between food and fuel. Using “virgin” plant material only heightens the problem. In addition, producing plants for the sole purpose of generating fuel drives up the price of food by reducing the amount of food grown.

According to their website, “Solazyme oils address many of the challenges associated with traditional oils, such as constrained supplies, volatile pricing, and potentially negative and irreversible environmental effects. The ‘drop-in’ nature of our tailored oils enables compatibility with existing production, refining, and distribution infrastructure in each of our target markets.” This second point is vital for the seamless integration of biofuels into the existing oil infrastructure. Many of the feedstocks are grown on land that would not produce viable agriculture.

Read more text http://www.greenconduct.com

Engineering

Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of people.

One who practices engineering is called an engineer, and those licensed to do so may have more formal designations such as Professional Engineer, Chartered Engineer, Incorporated Engineer, Ingenieur or European Engineer. The broad discipline of engineering encompasses a range of more specialized subdisciplines, each with a more specific emphasis on certain fields of application and particular areas of technology.

The American Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (ECPD, the predecessor of ABET)[1] has defined “engineering” as:

The creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.

Aimed at high school students considering engineering as a career, this video by the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences describes the unique features of engineering thinking and problem solving.

The Rise of Sustainable Supply Chains

After the recession of 2008 companies got leaner and part of this new way of doing business involves looking at inefficiencies throughout the value chain as a way to leverage cost and enhance savings. Lean efforts have been demonstrated to yield substantial environmental benefits (pollution prevention, waste reduction and reuse opportunities) as well as leverage compliance issues.

Although sustainable supply chains have been steadily growing, in 2010 we saw an explosion of activity. The growth of greener supply chains in 2010 included a much greater focus on monitoring, measurement and verification from a host of companies including Wal-Mart, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Kaiser Permanente, Puma, Ford, Intel, Pepsi, Kimberly-Clark,

Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Dell, AT&T, P&G, and Herman Miller.

In addition to private enterprise, government agencies in the US (General Services Administration) and abroad (DEFRA in Britain) have set green standards and guidelines for federal procurement.

Major value chain concerns such as materials water and waste management, are part of a growing sustainability trend where companies are increasingly concerned with their suppliers’ sustainability efforts.

Corporate social responsibility issues including addressing concerns for human rights, fair labor and sustainable development got a lot of attention from big companies like Nestle, Corporate Express, Danisco, Starbucks, Unilever and the apparel industry.

Read more text http://www.greenconduct.com

Benefits for a world of seven billion people

As the world population achieves a new landmark of seven billion people, ISO standards offer practical tools for sustainability and a better, safer world.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the population of our planet has now reached seven billion people (1). It said “This unique moment in human history represents both an achievement and a challenge, and will have an impact on every single person on the planet. A world of seven billion has implications for sustainability, urbanization, access to health services and youth empowerment – however, it also offers a rare call-to-action opportunity to renew global commitment for a healthy and sustainable world.”

ISO Secretary-General Rob Steele comments: “Standards play a pivotal role in facilitating the interaction of so many people. Every day, thousands of ISO standards help people at work, in the home and at play, by promoting quality and efficiency, making lives safer and more comfortable, fostering economic prosperity and looking after

our planet. And that is because ISO standards are made by people to help solve problems for people.”

Examples include standards for food safety, medical devices, social responsibility, building and construction, transportation and fighting climate change. Whether we are pressing on the brake of a car, playing ice hockey protected by a helmet, or using a computer, ISO standards make an important contribution to our safety and efficiency.

As the world population reaches seven billion, International Standards can help address the ever growing challenge of sustainability. For example, standards for food and water quality and for energy management can contribute to an effective use of resources. And standards for new technologies help promote and deploy innovations crucial to facilitating the lives of a rising population. In fact, most ISO standards contribute in one way or another to addressing the economic, societal and environmental aspects of sustainability.

Read more text http://www.iso.org

Effective Team Charter

Too often teams spend a considerable amount of their valuable resources trying to figure out what it is they are supposed to do, writes contributors John Moran, Grace Duffy and Michael Rudis. Before starting any type of a process improvement work, it is important to know where you’re headed. Here’s how a Team Charter can help.

A Team Charter is the official document from the team sponsor that empowers the team to act. It is a written document describing the mission of the team and how this mission is to be accomplished.

The Team Charter is one of the most under-used and under-valued tools available to sponsors, team leaders, and facilitators for helping a team succeed.But it is often overlooked because it is time consuming to develop. To write a clear, concise, and inclusive Team Charter requires great forethought and effort.

Often the sponsor is in such a rush to start the teaming process that they skip the basic step of filling out a Team Charter that clearly defines the goals and objectives to be achieved. When a team is started without a formal Team Charter many meetings are often wasted trying to figure “why we are here, what we should do, and when it should be done.” The team spends a considerable amount of time and energy trying to second guess what the sponsor really wanted when the team was formed. This is a loss of valuable time and talent that could be avoided by designing a clear mission statement prior to the team’s formation. That’s why a sponsor must take the time to fill out a Team Charter.

The Team Charter is an official work contract. This document delineates the strategic goals, boundaries, measures of success, constraints/limits, and available resources. The Team Charter provides a framework for ongoing discussions between the team and its sponsor with regard to the team’s direction and progress.

It is an iterative process until a base line acceptance is established. It must be reviewed on a regular basis by the sponsor, the team leader, facilitator, and team members to ensure that it is reflective of what the team is doing or will be doing in the future.

The following example of the use of a Team Charter in a Public Health Department is an excellent adaptation of the concepts in the original team charter article to provide a guidance document to beginning Process Action Teams.

Read more text http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com

Process Mapping Mistakes

Process mapping provides a structural analysis approach and a capability of delivering systematic outputs. But the effectiveness of process mapping is affected by how it is selected as the method of analysis, how it is planned and executed, says contributor Shu-Wing Pang. Here are 4 common ways process improvement professionals go wrong with process mapping. Process mapping is an analytical tool commonly applied by process improvement professionals. By capturing real-world operation and reflecting it through a set of processes, they can, firstly, visualize the inputs, interactions, deliverables and parties involved in an organisation’s operation and decision-making, and secondly, identify process inefficiencies, disjoints and improvement opportunities.

The effectiveness of process mapping, however, varies significantly based on the writer’s experience and observations. On one procurement process reengineering project, for example, process mapping was appropriately applied to summarize core processes and identify non-value-added activities to facilitate

improvement; but on another project, the consultants involved failed to capture the true scale of the operational processes in the organisation and the resultant improvement was unable to address the real underlying problems.

Problem of Ineffective Process Mapping

The following are four common problems which adversely affect the use of process mapping on identifying improvement opportunities. These problems are related to the appropriate use of the process mapping method, how process mapping is planned and executed.

Read more text http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com

Toyota

What do you get when you mix 1,000 engineers, four weeks of additional product development lead time and reduced reliance on outsourced engineering by 67%? In most product development departments this would get a decision maker quickly fired. Not so for Executive VP Takeshi Uchiyamada, a chief engineer at Toyota tasked with turning the tide on quality issues. Toyota is taking some expensive countermeasures to the root causes that their quality assurance process from the product design and testing standpoint seems to have been cut a bit too close to the bone over the past decade through cost reductions and development time reduction efforts.

According to the Wall Street Journal article Toyota Assigns 1,000 Engineers to Quality Drive :

Toyota Motor Corp. has assigned 1,000 engineers to help analyze quality problems and is extending time devoted



to testing new models by an average of four weeks in an effort to head off glitches before vehicles enter production

Toyota has so far spent about $4 billion to correct the problem of unintended acceleration in its vehicles, but this has been mostly containment and not root cause correction. The changes suggested in this article are aimed more at root causes, and will cost approximately $400 million if we take the cost of 1,000 engineers to be $150 million per year and estimate the cost of 4 weeks of lead time and the reduction in outsourcing to be another $250 million. Could this be a demonstration of the 10X rule of the cost of quality?

Toyota reportedly saved more than $11 billion in the early 2000s thanks to its CCC21 efforts, and some have linked these cost reductions in the design process as well as supply chain costs as contributors to today’s quality problems. Cost reduction should result from following and improving safe, high quality processes that deliver to customer’s expectations. When cost reduction programs put quality before the other KPIs there is a danger that the overall costs increase in the long-run.

Mr. Uchimayada said he would like to reduce the amount of outside engineers working on research and development, but the process will take time. The company must wait for contracts to expire before it can bring the work inside the company. A company executive said the target is 10% outside engineering contractors, down from 30% now.

Read more text http://www.gembapantarei.com

Seven Deadly Sins of Business Process Management

Business process management means many things to many people. Just take the words ‘process’ and ‘management’ alone – different people see these quite differently according to their perspective. For many BPM vendors and practitioners alike process management has come to mean process automation. Automation is important but it doesn’t constitute Management. From my perspective Management implies good governance,; each process should be seen as an important asset and therefore owned, understood, correctly applied and improved continuously.

The end goal is improved performance. That improvement may involve automation, but not in all cases. After all – if you look at the activities in your business the vast majority are performed by humans not machines and that’s not going to change any time soon. What irritates me

is that so many of the automation focused tools which purport to offer BPM, offer little capability with respect to Management as I define it above. The result can easily be the automation of processes which are suboptimal, not

properly understood, not properly applied and not continuously improved.

Perspectives: An earlier paper “What BPM Hat are you wearing?” explores the different process perspectives of four main stakeholder groups: End Users, IT, System providers and Risk / Compliance. Access the paper here.
In reality, processes start and end in very different places in the enterprise, often spanning multiple functional areas. There is a risk therefore that process improvement efforts are too narrowly silo’d.  The effect? Different departments fix just their part of a larger process.

It’s difficult to influence what happens either upstream or downstream from that part.  And yet improvement of the full end-to-end flow requires collaboration along the full path.  The failure to achieve such consensus could result in worsened performance, as a fix in one silo could be a retrograde step for another.

Read more text http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com

Genius of Steve Jobs

After the news today Apple’s founder and visionary Steve Jobs had passed away aged 56, so much is being said rightly about the technical genius of the man. His profound impact on lives is clear from the global tributes from world leaders, industry luminaries and oft times competitive rivals.

But beyond his astute commercial insight lies a deeper truth, which is much more important to Process Professionals and all us involved in building and developing Process Excellence.



We cannot easily quantify the impact on all of us. To live a life and touch so many people in such a significant way is incredible. What a truly amazing person. I don’t know where I would personally be without my iPhone, iPad and iTunes.

To briefly reflect on his impact in our process world I would like to share three of his key business insights that inspire me. Where did this notion come from? What imperative created this different way of looking at business? How does Apple consistently deliver exceptional performance for their shareholders, customers and employees? Here are some of the insights that I believe Steve Jobs brought to Apple to make it the world-beater it is today:

Insight Number 1: Discern the real need

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

How do you discern the real customer need and not just the want when so often the customer doesn’t know it themselves? Part of this genius is to transcend the customer surveys, research and legions of marketing agencies telling you about customer desires. You need to go beyond that and Steve Jobs did and described a way of thinking through the successful customer outcome and then, only then, align everything you do, through your processes, people and technology to achieving that objective. A collaborator (and sometimes Apple competitor) Jeff Bezos from Amazon describes the process as “working backwards”. He encapsulates the essence of this outside-in view of business “Hey, rather than ask what are we good at, ask who our customers are and what they need. We will figure out how to give it to them.”

Read more text http://www.processexcellencenetwork.com

Dedication ceremonies for the new facility are scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday, September 30 in the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s new Inasmuch Foundation Atrium. Guest speakers for the event include Dr. Paul Sieving, Director of the National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health; Dr. David Parke II, Executive Vice President and CEO of the

American Academy of Ophthalmology and previously President and CEO of the Dean McGee Eye Institute; Dr. M. Dewayne Andrews, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and Executive Dean of the OU College of Medicine; and the Honorable James Lankford, Congressman from Oklahoma’s Fifth Congressional District.

“This new facility will streamline the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s operations and enhance our multiple missions and programs by bringing them together under one roof,” said Dr. Gregory Skuta, President and CEO of the Dean McGee Eye Institute, and Edward L. Gaylord, Professor and Chair of the OU College of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology. “The tremendous growth of the Institute and our success in recruiting some of the nation’s leading research and clinical talent over the last two decades created crowded conditions and forced us to expand into other facilities. This remarkable new building will foster closer and more effective communication and collaboration as we continue to attract some of the finest minds in the country in vision care and research.”

According to James Tolbert III, chair of the Dean McGee Eye Institute’s Board of Trustees, “DMEI has become a national leader in ophthalmology under a long line of exceptional leaders – including current president, Dr. Gregory Skuta. The Institute’s blend of innovative clinical care, groundbreaking research, superior teaching, and unique administrative structure has made DMEI one of the nation’s premier eye institutes.”

Read more text http://www.news-medical.net