We wish all of you a merry christmas and a happy new year and hope that we can welcome some of you in June 2012 in Frankfurt!

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Change is persistant, what an old but never outdated wisdom.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

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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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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Outsourcing: The Big Lie

Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 22, 2011 — Outsourcing of production and services is the new norm. But in the search for lowest-cost providers, companies often overlook sensible considerations such as total cost, quality, logistics, innovation, and collaborating with partners for mutual prosperity.

John Shook, chairman and CEO of the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), will examine the downside of outsourcing in the opening keynote presentation, “Outsourcing: The Big Lie,” at the Northeast Shingo Prize Conference, Springfield, MA, Oct.5-6, 2011.

“While there are clearly times when outsourcing makes good business sense, academicians and theorists have  inadvertently oversold its benefits without rigorously considering the full consequences,” said Shook.

Lean Management Expert

In 11 years as a manager at Toyota, Shook helped the automaker introduce its lean management system to North America. He is co-author of the groundbreaking workbook Learning to See that introduced value-stream mapping to a worldwide audience and author of Managing to Learn on the A3 management process.

Shook called for developing lean supply chains to end the “madness” in today’s supply Chain during a panel discussion in June at the Rebuilding Japan Conference hosted by business information giant Bloomberg, LP, at the Japan Society in New York City.

Writing in his April 2011 eletter to the Lean Community, titled “Any Color You Want Except Tuxedo Black,” Shook explained the hidden dangers in today’s single sourcing strategies.

Lean in America Theme

The Northeast Shingo conference, with a 2011 theme of “Made Lean in America,” provides education and networking for managers and executives in manufacturing, healthcare, and government.

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Stealing the 7 Secrets

Taizo Ishida (1888-1979) took over the role of President of Toyota from the inventor and founder Kiichiro Toyoda in the midst of labor unrest, layoffs and the threat of bankruptcy.

Ishida is considered the “restorer of Toyota” for good reason in that his business acumen, leadership and what would later be called lean values helped bring Toyota out of its crisis. Ishida shares his secrets of success in the book The 7 Principles of Toyota’s Business Success (トヨタの商売 成功の7原則).

These seven principles are:

1. Establish industry with Japanese minds and skills. In this phrase we see a strong desire to contribute to a positive Japanese trade balance with the world, as well as to develop the nation’s industrial capability. Replace “industry” with your type of business, institution or economic sector and “Japanese” with the people of your own region and you can steal this secret of strong long-term purpose tied to community.



2. Good thinking, good products – creativity and craft. Both of these phrases can be seen with Toyota to this day, unchanged. They have survived for 60 years because they are timeless, pithy and proven to deliver results. Toyota’s business origins were in invention (the automatic loom) a good product from good thinking. The name of Toyota’s kaizen suggestion system is the “creativity and craft” system, which Toyota stole from Ford in 1951. In principle or in practice, this is is a success secret every organization should own.

3. Spirit of country people. There may be a note of local pride or even defiance here, as the region of Toyota’s origin was rural and far from the financial, intellectual or economic center of Japan. No doubt the rural values of hard work, resourcefulness and the lack of unnecessary cultural sophistication in running a successful manufacturing business was a part of this principle. The harried treasure hunter leaves behind what looks suspiciously like large lump of coal. The savvy treasure hunter steals this huge gem.

4. Indomitable fighting spirit – will power. Steal this if you can, beg or borrow it if you can’t, but make it yours and don’t give it back.

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coordinates and organizes the collection and dissemination of clean data.

Express joins BioClinica’s other solutions to improve the efficiency and flexibility required for modern clinical trials. Express is fully integrated in real-time with BioClinca’s Trident IWR and OnPoint CTMS systems. This enables real time data exchange between Express and OnPoint CTMS to support site payment data or visit status updates. Complementing best-in-class functionality is a web services architecture that communicates in real-time between applications and maximizes data visibility and utility via SharePoint with built-in connectivity to Outlook and other Microsoft Office applications. Express also provides on-demand exports for further analysis in SAS or other analytical tools.

“This release of Express EDC is a major advancement for the BioClinica Suite. Sponsors and CROs can choose any of our world-class solutions as a stand-alone or a starting point – then augment functionality for any study when they need it,” said Peter Benton, President of eClinical Solutions for BioClinica. “With the only portfolio of eClinical applications all created within the last five years, BioClinica offers a remarkably different approach with fresh ideas to address the challenges facing clinical organizations globally.”



BioClinica Express provides new capabilities for EDC power users that make slicing and dicing incoming data fast and easy and automatically encodes medical terms within the same application. Role-specific dashboards focus attention where it’s needed the most and data managers can tag or bookmark data to facilitate workflow, save customized data and query listings as ‘private’ or ‘public’ for later use. Study build timelines are minimized using an innovative design environment that reduces programming and maximizes re-usability.

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These results were reported on 17 June 2011 at the launching by ISO of the new standard at the Geneva International Conference Centre (CICG), Switzerland. ISO Secretary-General Rob Steele told the international audience of nearly 200 people attending the event: “Energy is no longer a technical issue, but a management issue with an impact on the bottom

line and the time to address the issue is now.” The event included presentations by three out of some 100 experts from 45 countries who participated in developing the standard. Hamilton , Director, Global Energy and Sustainability Services, Hewlett Packard (USA), described ISO 50001 as a “very pragmatic standard” which will help companies to integrate energy management with business practices. It will allow multinational companies like Hewlett Packard to reduce energy costs and increase the efficiency of energy use throughout global supply chains.

Mr Hamilton quoted results from two pilot implementations which were part of the Superior Energy Performance programme sponsored by the US Council for Energy Efficient Manufacturing and the US Department of Energy.
He cited the experience of two plants. One of them was a plant owned by a major company, Dow Chemicals. The plant reduced its use of energy by 17.9 % over two years. At the same time, ISO 50001 principles are also successfully implemented by small businesses as shown by the experience of the other plant, CCP, of Houston, Texas, employing 36 people. In two years, it achieved energy savings of 14.9 %, worth USD 250 000 a year with zero capital investment.

continue reading at:http://www.iso.org