James L Adams—People and Products

Holidays, Ants, and a Computer Break

Having told you of the pleasures of welding in my post of  November 19th  , I am proud to say that the ant I was working on is now one of my wife’s favorite yard animals (of which she has many).  In fact it is featured in our Christmas card, which is shown below and which I am sending you with hopes that you are enjoying an outstanding holiday season.

I am giving my hard-working computer a break through the end of the year.  So I will not be posting again until New Years day, at which point I will be back on my Monday, Thursday schedule with lots to say about the winter quarter Stanford Good Products Bad Products course, and of course the products we make for ourselves.

 

 

Reijo Leppanen and collecting bad products

I recently received a nice message from Reijo Leppanen, a Finish Engineer.  It began “I have just recently read the Good Products, Bad Products book.  I enjoyed it indeed”.  But even better than telling me he enjoyed my book, he went on to say “I’m myself a hobbyist in bad products, especially since an individual cannot avoid them nowadays.  See here:” and then he gave me a link to his website, which is here.  He has apparently been pursing this hobby since 1998. I found his website wonderful and hope you do also.

 The site contains photographs of over 250 products, along with the price, the names of the seller and the manufacturer, and a brief note of what is wrong with them and sometimes what should be done to improve them. He describes this hobby as collecting products that are “miserably designed, miserably manufactured, miserably documented, or otherwise miserable”.

 Having oriented the Good Products Bad Products book somewhat toward people involved in producing products, I occasionally wish I had written one for the general public to encourage consumers to think more critically about the quality of the products they buy.  But I never thought about encouraging people to adopt criticizing products as a hobby.  Great idea, Reijo Leppanen.  I will definitely bring his website to the attention of the 150 or so students that will be taking the course this year, and spread word of it by other means.

 As part of the course, students read and discuss my book, and submit examples of good and bad products consistent with the elements of product quality being discussed at the time, along with photographs and short paragraphs describing why they consider the products to be good or bad.  The course uses software called Coursework, which allows the students to see and discuss each other’s work, and a Wiki which allows them to build an ongoing list of the products.  I will be discussing these in my blog posts during the Stanford Winter Quarter, which runs from early January through late March.

 I give them these exercises to encourage them to be more critical of product quality, and in fact wrote the book to give them particular elements of product quality to focus upon.  Hopefully they too will become hobbyists and follow the lead of Mr. Leppanen. 

 

Product Quality and Balance

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote a poem entitled “The One Hoss Shay”, that still is referenced by people associated with product design and development.  It is about a mythical vehicle that is so well designed and crafted that it lasts 100 years without failing in any way, and then completely collapses as all of the parts simultaneously reach the end of their life span.  If you want to read it, look here.

 More of such balance in reliability and durability would be nice in modern products.  Many products are annoying because some parts fail much earlier and more often than others, until finally these parts are no longer available and the whole product is junked.

  But there is another type of balance, having more to do with quality.  The photo is of my wife Marian in her 2004 Acura TSX, leaving early in the morning to control the world.  We bought the car new to make up for a beloved Honda CRX that she drove for 18 years, until an evil person roared out of a driveway and destroyed it. She didn’t want a big car, needed to drive grand-kids and friends around, likes nimble and responsive cars, and at times can be a mild hot-rodder.  The TSX is neither the fastest, the most beautiful, the most luxurious, the roomiest, or the best handling automobile available, but it is pretty good on all fronts. She has loved it absolutely for eight years. For her (and actually for me) it is an extraordinary blend. It is based on the so-called European Accord body (a bit smaller than the Accord sold in the U.S.)  It has front wheel drive and the engine produces about 200 horsepower and is easy on fuel.  It goes faster than either of us needs it to and is fitted with plenty of digital gadgets—Navigation system, climate control, sound system— but not so many that we will die messing with them while driving (a friend of mine has ceded the driving to his wife while he attends to the much more elaborate navigation system, the cell phones, the doors and windows, the TV, the climate control and sound system, and so on.) The TSX is also clearly a product of Honda, and we have always liked such things.

 I spoke of David Garvin’s now classic article in the Nov 1, 1987 Harvard Business Review, entitled “Competing on the Eight Dimensions of Quality” in my post of  Nov. 1, 2012. The dimensions he discusses are performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality. The TSX gets high grades on all of them.  In my book Good Products, Bad Products, I discuss performance and cost, human fit, craftsmanship, emotional response, aesthetics, cultural fit, and global fit.  The TSX also gets high grades on all of them.

 In the design, development, and marketing of many products, we often tend to emphasize only a few components of quality.  These days we are excited about digital control.  I just bought a new dishwasher.  Since the old one failed in its rather complicated control circuitry, and since I couldn’t find replacement parts that I considered reasonably priced, I bought a new one with the fewest cycles and options I could find.  I finally found one with only(?) five possible cycles, three options, a delay, and a large row of warning lights.  Of course, we only use the “normal” button.  The dishwasher will probably fail because of the circuitry necessary to allow it to do something we don’t ever use.  As people used to say when I worked at the Jet Propulstion Lab, “Reliability is fewer parts”—that's electrical as well as mechanical.

 Good Products should rate high in all components of quality—just like the One Hoss Shay did in reliability and durability.

 

 

Sucking, Blowing, and Cursing – A Shop Vacuum That Should Have Been Better

I have often bought Craftsman tools, and they in general have served me well.  I have had the shop vacuum in the photo for several years, and I did buy it for a very reasonable cost, and it does indeed suck and blow well and handle most jobs I assign it, but it occasionally requires me to kick it and speak to it in obscene terms in order to avoid becoming overly angry with it. The photo shows it waiting to make my shop immaculate.

 It is a 9 gallon wet or dry vacuum that proudly proclaims to be powered by four horsepower and blow at 140 miles per hour.  That seems to be quite a bit of horsepower for what it does, and I am not sure what blowing 140 miles per hour refers to or means in terms of moving dirt, but electrically it has so far been completely dependable.  I use it for cleaning everything from my shop to machinery and vehicles, to sucking occasional errant rainwater out of my basement and blowing dirt, dust, and remnants of rat nests out of corners. And unlike some other shop vacuums I have encountered, it does have a plug at the bottom to drain out the water it collects if used “wet”.

 My annoyances with this vacuum  could have been solved by a few simple changes in the design, and the fact that they weren’t made before production leads me to believe that maybe the designers didn’t prototype and test enough, or maybe didn’t live with shop vacuums.  I have not bought and tested a brand new one, so for all I know, these changes have been made.  But I like to comment on products that have had some usage, since many problems only become apparent after the thrill of the new wears off.

 To mention a few, the wheels are not large enough to roll over the cord.  Since it is very difficult to use a device such as this without running over the cord, this results in the need to either pick it up or pull on the hose hard enough to either tip the machine over or if the tiny hose clip is not fastened, pull the hose out of the tank. My former Craftsman shop vacuum had no clip at all, depending on the tight fit between the hose and the tank.  But if the hose was pushed into the tank sufficiently hard to remain, especially when blowing with a reducing tip, it was a pain to pull apart.  The clip is an improvement, but it is only on one end of the hose, with the result that the hose must be wrestled around until the clamp end goes into the tank, and then the nozzle tends to blow off. The hose should have been equipped with larger and stronger clips on each end and rims on the appliances as well.

 The handles on the blower portion serve to lift either the top or the whole unit.  But the catch to separate the top and the tank are integrated, so that often when picking up the unit, one accidently separates the two parts, with the result that the tank falls either part way or completely off, with the potential of either tripping  the user, spilling obnoxious substances on them, or allowing them to start all over again.  The latches could have been physically separated from the handles and made more positive.

  And  there should be a better way of coiling up the hose and the electrical cord.  Typically the plastic unit that is supposed to fasten the hose when coiled gets lost early in the game, and the hose ends up taking up large amounts of space and getting stepped on.  The electrical wire is not happy if wound around the top of the  vacuum and therefore falls onto the floor to assist the hose in trying to trip  the user.  The vacuum came with a horde of accessories, most of which I never use and which tend to fall out of their holders.  Seems like there might be more thought on securing the cord and hose, even if a couple of accessories were not included (they could be bought separately, thus bringing more shoppers into Sears.)  The photo shows some of the attachments from previous vacuums I have never used and a couple left over clipless hoses.  I am keeping them because perhaps some day I will make a marvelous musical instrument from them — or maybe a construction toy for kids.

 Also, the ports for sucking and blowing should be clearly marked.  When the vacuum is used by people who do not use it much and who do not stop to figure out the principle of the thing (like my wife) the hose often gets put on the wrong port and the user is amazed when they turn the machine on, only to see the pile of filth they thought was going to disappear into the machine be blown all over the room.

 And as a minor point, there is a label on the vacuum that reads “Is your filter dirty?  Visit Your Local Sears Store for a Replacement.”  Shades of so-called  quick oil change places.  Filters are supposed to have dirt on them.  That’s what they are for.  The filters in my vacuum can be easily removed, beaten on the inside of a garbage can or hit with a stick, brushed, and even blown off with the vacuum itself.  It would be nice for Sears if everyone who found dirt on their filter came running in to buy a new one, but Jeez—one shouldn’t prey on innocents.

 

Good Products—A Beauty and a Beast

The product on the left of the photo makes a miraculous froth of milk. In discrete letters, it states Bonjour, Primo Latte on the side, so we can assume that it is French.  It requires two AA batteries and does its job beautifully on fat free milk, low fat milk, and other healthy versions that my wife prefers on top of her coffee.  I am fascinated by it because it doesn’t require cream,  does its job so fast, and is so easy to clean.  It is also extremely attractive.  Its only downside seems to be that one must be very careful, or the plastic case breaks when changing batteries. 

 The product on the right creates whipped cream rapidly in large quantities.  No batteries, not breakable, and far from beautiful, but surprisingly enough, containing few worrisome chemicals.  The propellant is nitrous oxide  which is often called laughing gas, and can react with oxygen and form nitric oxide, which is a pollutant (both a green house gas and  a reactant with ozone). But pressure cans are a tiny source of this compared with industrial and agricultural processes, to say nothing of automobile emissions.

 The pressurized whipped cream (or topping, as it says on the can), is particularly miraculous if you happen to like whipped cream (which most people do) and have experienced making it from fresh cream, an activity which occupies quite a bit of time, and requires cleaning a bowl and the complex device used to whip it and figuring out how to store that which is left over.  Perhaps the pressure can variety it is not quite as good as “real” whipped cream. And I suppose its health benefits can be questioned from the standpoint of consumption. But it is certainly convenient.

 My rather large family was over for Thanksgiving dinner, and several of the members are justly proud of their pie-making abilities.  The adults in the family are usually careful to restrict themselves to healthy foods and caloric intake.  I equipped the table with a couple of pressure cans of whipped cream, and like everyone else, happily partook of the pleasure of dolloping huge quantities of it on the many pieces of pie needing sampling.  Several of the younger guests could be seen surreptitiously squirting it on their hands and licking it off.  As a result of these pressure cans, I have developed a need for whipped cream on an amazing number of foods that I did not used to know required it.

 Perhaps a sin, but a mild one—not even a jailable offence.

Outsourcing, Insourcing, and Product Quality.

The days a lot of media attention is being given to the U.S manufacturing industry. Outsourcing in particular is a topic of interest. A few articles defend outsourcing  on the basis of maximizing company profits. An example is this one, written by Dan Ikensen and appearing in Forbes. Many take the position of improveing the health of manufacturing in the U.S.through small, fast, start-ups. An example is this article by James Fallows from the December 2012 issue of the Atlantic. But I was particularly taken by the article by Charles Fishman in the same issue, entitled "The Insourcing Boom", which I mentioned in my last post, because it occurred in a large established company in the U.S.

The media is so dazzled by high technology, rapid growth, and quick money, that it is somewhat overlooking more traditional manufacturing and larger, established companies. Granted such things are exciting, but many of the things we depend upon are both important and major factors in our economy and come from more traditional sources.  We have gotten used to expecting radical changes in our digital devices and associated software (the internet, apps) and are accepting the cost of upgrades to hastily produced products and the associated time expenditure in learning new moves and tricks to operate them. Would you like to see similar change in automobiles, refrigerators, and home furnaces? At first glance, change is associated with better performance, and is good. But people need control as well as creativity, and tradition as well as innovation. So for many of our products, including many of the important ones, we would like long-term reliable service without needing constantly to learn new tricks to use them.

That is why I was happy to read Fishman's article about bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., which featured General Electric’s decision to essentially re-open their large Appliance Park complex and the gains that they found from doing so. I did not find the gains that surprising. In the making of complex products, requiring large numbers of specialists working together, these is a tendency to find tribes forming around functions and disciplines, who do not understand the complexity of each other’s work, and tend to blame other tribes for shortcoming. During the days of obsession with manufacturing quality in the U.S., this was found to be particularly true  between design,  manufacturing , and business. This tribalization has a large negative impact on product quality. It can  be reduced by such things as cross functional/disciplinary teams and flatter organizations.  Quality is always improved by integrating people from design, manufacturing, and various business functions. In a small company working in a single location, this tends to happen automatically. In a larger company, especially one working across national boundaries, it does not.

I particularly liked the example of the moving of the manufacture of a particular water heater from China back to Appliance Park. The water heater was a sophisticated and complicated one, cutting energy cost by utilizing a heat pump to use the surrounding air to help heat the water. It was originally designed by G.E. in Louisville. and then the design was sent to China for manufacturing.   When brought back to Appliance Park for manufacturing after several years in China, the manufacturing engineers re-designed it, because it seemed to them too difficult to make. The quoted reaction in the article from the manufacturing engineers was “This is just a mess. In terms of manufacturability, the design is terrible”—a typical reaction of manufacturing people who have not been actively involved in a design, and usually a valid one.  The problem was probably perceived as even more serious than it was, because during the time the water heater was being manufactured in China, G.E. had ceased making water heaters in the U.S., and in the words of the author, "had forgotten how to make them"

In the re-design, the team managed to make the water heater much easier to manufacture, and in the process eliminated 20% of the parts, cut the cost of materials by 25 percent, and cut the hours necessary to assemble the heater from 10 hours in China to 2 hours in Louisville. The result was that the retail sticker price of the heater made In China was $1,599, and that of the heater made in Louisville was $1,299. A demonstration of improved quality through involving manufacturing people in design and vice versa. Despite the miracles of modern communication, this is more difficult to do across an ocean than across a desk or over a coffee cup.

Go Appliance Park.

Stanford Product Realization Lab #2

In my last post I talked about the history of the student shops at Stanford.  What has happened since Dave Beach took over?  The shops have morphed into the Product Realization Laboratory, which sees its mission as giving students insight into and practice at integrated design and manufacture, and has progressed far beyond its original goals.  As an example, it now offers an M.S. degree specialization in the Mechanical Engineering Department.  The growth of the activity has been steady and increasing, as can be seen from the figure below. 

At present the supervising committee of the lab consists of Dave, Craig Milroy , Marlo Dreissigacker,  Jonathan Edelman, Matt Ohline, Nora Sweeny, and Frances Yang.  The shops now contain not only modern equipment for machining, casting, joining, and wood and plastic working, but also for the manufacturing of mechatronic devices and experimenting with emerging processes such as additive manufacturing. 

Not all courses taught under the banner of the Product Realization Lab take advantage of the shops. An example of one that does not is the Good Products, Bad Products course. And the program stresses design as well as manufacturing, and emphasizes the fact that they are two sides of the same coin. But some 12 courses draw directly upon the shops, and some 20 teaching assistants are involved in teaching, coaching, and supervising not only the students in the Product Realization Lab courses, but also individual students using the shops for other purposes. In my mind, these teaching assistants, graduating with advanced degrees in engineering, highly developed shop skills, and teaching experience, are among the most impressive graduates at Stanford, and demonstrate that by the positions they occupy after graduation.

 What does this program bring to Stanford students and the world?  The cover topic of the December 2012 issue of the Atlantic is “Comeback – Why the Future of Industry is in America.  The magazine contains an excellent article by Charles Fishman, entitled “The Insourcing Boom”, that among other items, discusses the General Electric decision to bring appliance manufacturing back to its neglected Appliance Park location in the U.S..  I will talk about it in my next blog, but if you want an advanced peek at it, it is here.

 At one point, the article states that the  practice of creating a good design and then outsourcing the manufacturing is akin to writing a cookbook without ever cooking. Twenty  years ago I thought that U.S. industry had finally learned the necessity of constant close cooperation and communication between manufacturing and design people throughout the development of products.  But we seem to have somewhat forgotten that in the glory of perceived high profit. The article maintains that we were perhaps short sighted.  The students taking advantage of the Product Realization Lab at Stanford are the type of people needed for the U.S. move back into manufacturing at home.

 The program gives students a chance to view the whole process of making products, from initial problem through finished hardware/software, and to me even more importantly, gives the students insight into the joy of making things, and teaches the intrinsic knowledge needed in producing outstanding products.  Cooking does enable the writing of better cookbooks.  Universities such as Stanford, in pursuit of new insights and knowledge, often allow their classes to become tedious and less than exciting in the process of attempting to squeeze more and more into a finite time.  As the photos below show, such is not the case in the Product Realization Laboratory.