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.

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Information security controls

An ISO/IEC technical report (TR) providing technical controls and compliance guidelines for auditors can improve the effectiveness of an organization’s information security system.

ISO/IEC TR 27008:2011, Information technology – Security techniques – Guidelines for auditors on information security controls, aims to instill confidence in the controls underpinning an organization’s information security management system. The review applies to all parts of the organization, including business processes and its information systems environment.

“The business environment is constantly changing – along with threats to a company’s survival. Organizations

need to be ahead of the game, and an excellent defence can be built around audit of the controls used to support the information security,” says Edward Humphreys, leader of the working group that developed the new document.



“ISO/IEC TR 27008:2011 supports a rigorous organizational security audit and review programme for information security controls, to enable the organization to have confidence that their controls have been appropriately implemented and operated and that their information security is ‘fit for purpose’.”

ISO/IEC 27008 provides guidance on reviewing the implementation and operation of controls, including technical compliance checking. The document is principally aimed at information security auditors who need to check the technical compliance of an organization’s information security controls against ISO/IEC 27002 and any other control standards used by the organization. ISO/IEC TR 27008 will help them to:

- Identify and understand the extent of potential problems and shortfalls of information security controls
- Identify and understand the potential organizational impacts of inadequately mitigated information security threats and vulnerabilities
– Prioritize information security risk mitigation activities
– Confirm that previously identified or emergent weaknesses or deficiencies have been adequately addressed
– Support budgetary decisions within the investment process and other management decisions relating to improvement of organization’s information security management.

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Three Challenges Facing Operational Excellence in Utilities

Within a regulated industry like utilities, operational excellence is a key tool in the balancing act between keeping prices for consumers down and providing value for shareholders. However, market forces are combining to place hurdles in the way of utilities’ continuous improvement efforts, which will ultimately be to the benefit of consumers. In the UK, for example, the “Big Six” energy suppliers are facing pressure from the public and regulators to keep retail prices down and for their influence on the market to be reduced. The energy infrastructure in the country is ageing and a quarter of the capacity will be decommissioned by 2020. Climate change legislation is placing an ever increasing burden on operations. These factors broadly align with the three major challenges facing operational excellence in utilities across the globe: new obligations, changes to the industry landscape and a growing, more demanding customer base.

Challenge 1: Market Reforms



Utilities have often found themselves faced with market reforms, due the essential service they provide and the inevitably costs this presents to the consumer.



The aforementioned changes taking place in the UK form part of the government’s wider Electricity Market Reforms, created to help the country meet its legally binding target of cutting CO2 emission by 80 percent by 2020.

Measures laid out to help achieve this include the introduction of a carbon floor price, new long-term contracts to offer investment incentives and an emissions performance standard. More than £110 billion will be required to make the infrastructure updates needed, and a proportion of this will need to come from suppliers.

Achieving operational excellence in the face of these changes presents a significant challenge.

Challenge 2: Changing Customer Expectations :

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Future of Quality

Change is persistant, what an old but never outdated wisdom. But what does that mean to our organizational environment? What does that mean concerning the job outline of a Quality Systems Manager? We will give you to both questions some answers. Mr. Paul Borawski, Chief Executive Officer, American Society for Quality, will provide you with useful information about the future of quality. He will invite you to lead. To take action. To prepare yourself and your organizations to benefit by anticipating and preparing for the future.

Mr. Benedikt Sommerhoff, Senior Consultant, German Society for Quality, is going to outline the change of the

occupational image of a Quality Systems Manager and will invite you to look into the future.

Closing Ceremony and Announcement of the 56th EOQ Congress

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.

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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.

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C++ language

C++, one of the most popular programming languages used in everything from Web browsers to 3D video games, has been fully updated and published as, ISO/IEC 14882:2011, Information technology – Programming languages – C++.

ISO/IEC 14882:2011 defines the programming language and specifies requirements for implementation. Also known as C++11, this is the first major revision of the standard since 1998. Its new features extend C++’s traditional strengths of flexibility and efficiency – for example, lambda functions, move semantics, and variadic templates further enable developers to use powerful expressiveness and strong abstraction to write efficient,

high-performance code with full access to the hardware available when needed. Even more, the new C++11 has the convenience and ease of use of other modern languages – from features like auto type deduction and explicit virtual override control, to standard smart pointers that mean never writing delete again.



“During recent years the industry has paid more attention to ‘newer’ managed-code environments like Java that emphasize programmer convenience at the expense of expressive power and performance, for example by requiring always-on garbage collection, metadata for reflection, and virtual machine execution that incur a performance expense even when they’re not needed or used,” explains Herb Sutter, Convener of the ISO working group that developed the standard.

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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.

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Lean Healthcare Experts Speaking

Roger A Gerard Ph.D., ThedaCare’s chief learning officer, and co-author of On the Mend, is a member of a comprehensive lineup of experts addressing continuous improvement in healthcare at this month’s AME Conference, Oct. 24 – 28, Dallas.

On the Mend was published by the Lean Enterprise Institute in June 2010.

What follows is an overview of the healthcare lineup. Stop by Booth 311 to say Hello to the LEI team. Hope to see you there!

PRESENTATIONS
- The Game Changer that Propelled our Journey Towards Easier, Better, Faster, Cheaper. Alice Lee; Beth Israel

Deaconess Medical Center
- The Skinny on the Emergency Department Redesign. Gregory Horner, Michelle Ruther, Loyola University Medical Center

- Continuous Improvement in Healthcare. Darryl Greene
Lisa Yerian, MD; Cleveland Clinic

- Leveraging Cross-Industry Collaboration in Lean Healthcare. Kathleen Sharp CPC, CMM; Lehigh Valley Health Network

- People to Redeploy: What do we do? Katie Ball PhD, Roger A Gerard PhD; ThedaCare

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Toyota Production System

According to the Buddha there are three characteristics of existence:

Impermanence
Dissatisfaction
Non-self

Becoming deeply aware of these “Three Dharma Seals” (三法印) is said to bring about wisdom and an end to the cycle of rebirth and suffering.

I read an article by an ex-Toyota manager who was responsible for starting up the Tahara factory in Toyota, Japan.

He wrote that “at the foundational philosophy of the true Toyota Productions System” there are 4 items:

Respect for people
Impermanence (諸行無常)



Mutual existence and prosperity
Genchi genbutsu

Items 1, 3 and 4 should be familiar to readers but what is meant by #2? This particular Buddhist expression means that “All worldly things are transitory.” The author explained that companies are living organisms that weaken if not exercised and that die if they do not change. To accept impermanence is to embrace change. He wrote, “The purpose of today is also to prepare for tomorrow.”

Where do we see evidence of this philosophy of impermanence within the Toyota Production System?

Kaizen. Many small changes are applied repeatedly to a process. There is never a perfect condition or a solution, only steps toward it. Dissatisfaction with the current condition is essential.

Success. Celebrate briefly and then do hansei (reflection) on what was done right, what was just luck and what could be done better next time. A bit of non-self (humility) and an awareness of impermanence are essential to gaining perspective on success.

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