Tuesday, June 17, 2008

The art of public speaking



I am just new to my job and thinking to solve one of my future problem that I will be facing soon.

And it is a big one:Recognition from the peers in the company.

When I scrutinize the situation, it came to me clear that to solve this problem , I need to in:

Long term : Work hard to earn my recognition

Short term : In the coming annual sales meeting cum company open house in Headquarter ,Germany to convince people with my speech as my director introduces me to the heads of our subsidiaries.

I guess what can be done is to get the 1st contact and impression correct.

therefore some research in public speaking is really necessary here.

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Company Background :
Headquarter in Herne, Germany
16 wholly-owned subsidiaries worldwide
2 Joint Ventures
30 agencies and offices in 24 countries
1000 employees worldwide.

Strong message from the owner of company:

Since 1889 the company has been in the sole ownership of the xxxx family.

For generations it was always important for all the family members to be honest and serious in matters concerning employees and business partners.

It is still the desire of all the members of the family to remain an independent family business.

How we can accomplish this together can be seen in the following Value Concepts and Management Guidelines '

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Here will be the draft of the speech:

- My short background review
- Introduction
What bring us here together? Business? Its the family value that company emphasized and insisted on!!

- My expectation
-To know every individual in depth day by day. Have dinner, drink together and even watch a movie!
- To learn intensively from everyone , grow and be apart of the family!

- Closing
Once again My name is Eric Boon , This job is my passion , VULKAN is my family!!

Thank you. (about 5 mins)
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The above is the initial draft , I am not sure if it sound convincing though.
My point of view is that besides business, there should be something touches a human's heart, and that is ethical issue and value.

Family value is a good common ground for a international speech although we come from different countries with different background , family is still remain an important value to everyone of us.


Learning Materials:

There are actually some free material online and people can learn from it!!

click here to learn Public speaking

and some clear steps from Mr Mohnot:

INQUIRE about background of audience, purpose of meeting and speeches which will be delivered before yours.

TIP 16
RESEARCH and collect data, exact figures, latest developments, interesting little known facts, expert opinions, any other relevant information which would humor, fascinate or surprise the audience.

TIP 17
BRAINSTORM carry a rough paper or spiral book with you all the time. Let your mind play freely, lazily, on all facets of the subject. Whenever and whatever flashes of ideas, phrases, thoughts and interesting remarks, come to your mind, immediately jot down. Do not select or reject any idea at this stage. Keep playing more on them, wildly, like a child. Give free hand to your creativity.

TIP 18
SIT down with your DATA & SCRAPS, organize them into few major points and discard all the rest unnecessary data .

TIP 19
WRITE a systematic sequential essay ie. The Body of your Speech.

EDIT it for contents, ruthlessly.

TIP 20
AUDIO-EDIT. Read the write up aloud, and hear it as the audience will.
Replace difficult to ears words & phrases with simpler, sweeter ones.
Speech is not an Essay, which can be read again to understand .

TIP 21
THINK of an attention catching, sparkling, luring line of OPENING, and momentous, impact-making, memorable PUNCH-LINE for CLOSING.

TIP 22
SPEAK the complete speech once. Polish Opening & Punch-line.

I hope we learn bit by bit and stay curious!!

Here I end with a memorable speech by Roberto Benigni when he won the Oscar Award

Roberto Begnini - 1999
Roberto Begnini gave us some of the most entertaining Oscar speeches in 1999 when he swept the board with his masterpiece, Life is Beautiful. He started the ceremony by aping around shouting ’Thank you! Thank you! I want to be rocked by the waves of your love!’ when presented with the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. He followed up with a collection of the Best Actor Oscar, ’This must be a mistake because I’ve used up all my English,’ he cried before going on to ramble about ’egg salad sandwiches in the aisles of liquid,’ and how he was ’besiding myself’. As if that wasn’t enough the hilarious chap was invited back the next year to present the Best Actress Oscar, ’I have run around like a dog! Look at me bark! Look at me happy as a yellow wicked film clam!’

view video here

Monday, March 17, 2008

Case Studies: Increasing Throughput with Lean Concepts


Mar 17, '08 9:11 AM
for everyone
What was once an area so full of pallets, totes and parts that it took a team member up to three hours per day to find orders is now an organized, visually controlled lean work cell. Source: Argent Global Services Inc.

February 22, 2008



Joe Oakley, powdercoat team leader for Edmond, OK-based Pelco Products Inc., manufacturer of traffic signal hardware, structural poles, decorative lighting and utility hardware, knew he wanted to use lean in his department. After attending a Lean 101 class, Oakley returned to work and saw other departments and work cells implementing lean concepts all over the manufacturing floor at Pelco. The problem was he did not know where or how to start.

Oakley approached Pelco’s lean consultants from Argent Global Services (Oklahoma City, OK) and asked what he could do. “I wanted so badly to do something, because our department was viewed as the biggest bottleneck in the plant.” The lean team explained to Oakley that there was a plan in place to implement lean company-wide. Powdercoat was not at the top of the implementation list, and Oakley was told, “Use what you have learned. Don’t wait for a lean project to be facilitated for you.”

The results were impressive. Oakley’s team saw their daily totals go from painting less than 800 parts per day, with an occasional “great day” being around 1,000 pieces, to producing an average of 1,016 pieces per day. “We thought we had really done something great by using visual aids to create inbound and outbound lanes labeled with due dates on signs for each lane. Our throughput increased by more than 32%, and we eliminated more than 2.5 man-hours per day of searching for orders that needed to be painted,” says Oakley.


Not Good Enough

“What we thought initially was going to be big, actually just increased our frustration,” says Oakley of the first lean attempt. “We were still being called the bottleneck. We didn’t know what to do. But we stuck to the plan and hoped a lean facilitator would soon come to lead us in a project.”

That day came in April 2007. Unfortunately, the timing was not in Oakley’s favor. A lean project led by Trevor Mann, senior engineer at Argent, started while Oakley was out on leave. When he returned a week later he did not recognize his powdercoat area. “The team had totally changed the way we were operating—the way we hung parts, the way we packaged some parts, even the way we were applying powder had changed. I was extremely frustrated. But Trevor stayed by my side and worked with me. He didn’t force things on me. He asked me questions and made me discover the answers for myself. Even my team worked with me to make sure I understood all the changes they had made in my absence,” explains Oakley.

“Every day it got a little easier. And then we thought we had it made. Our throughput numbers leveled out in the 1,500 to 1,700 parts per day range.” The improvements resulted in an average throughput increase of more than 52%. Supermarkets for the higher volume parts made it easier to hang and paint larger jobs at one time.

The results were a welcome relief to Oakley and his team. But there were still days when they had both the warehouse, which fed them parts, and the assembly cells pointing fingers directly at powdercoat. And there appeared to be a pattern forming. “We would get caught up, refill our supermarkets and clear the inbound lanes,” says Oakley. “And then, all of a sudden, we would be swamped, several days behind and not have a clue what had gone wrong. The frustration was returning and I didn’t know how to solve the problem.”

A meeting in July 2007 between Oakley, his team, the warehouse team leader, assembly team leader and the production manager, Kevin Shook, brought the issue to light. Shook explains, “I, along with our assembly and warehouse team leaders, had been trying to change powdercoat’s rules. In our desire to satisfy our customers and get orders out the door, we were demanding things of Oakley and his team that in hindsight didn’t really make sense.”

A 15-minute meeting and a little point kaizen went a long way in addressing powdercoating’s issues. The inbound lanes were changed. One lane for each of the three major paint colors was established. A fourth lane was added for “all other colors,” and a “hot lane” for late orders caused by parts shortages was set up next to the parts hanging station.

Each of the four color lanes is now worked one hour at a time. “Hot orders” are worked into the mix for that color at the beginning of each lane. Oakley also has the freedom to rearrange which lane is worked and in what order. The goal is to use the lean concept of EPE (the every part every interval) to run every color at least once each morning and once each afternoon during every 10-hour day.

The results have been dramatic. On the first day after the changes were made in July, the powdercoat cell produced 3,114 parts, a 91.6% increase over the previous daily average of 1,625 parts. On the second day after the change, the cell produced 4,712 parts. The cell began to settle down on the third day because the entire backlog had been eliminated. All these results were accomplished by the same seven-person team that had been struggling for several years.


The Optimized Process

Joe Oakley of Pelco Products in front of some of the redesigned parts trees on the powdercoat line. Source: Argent Global Services Inc.
As of November 15, 2007, the powdercoat cell is averaging 3,429 parts painted per day. There is no backlog, and the warehouse is worried that because the lanes are not full they are not doing their job correctly. Oakley points out, “We are constantly reminding the order fillers in the warehouse that if we are doing our job correctly and they are balancing their order pulling to our speed, they won’t ever fill up the lanes. As long as we have some work sitting in a lane, we’re happy. And if there is no order sitting to be painted we immediately begin 5S activities (sorting, simplifying, sweeping, standardizing and sustaining) to clean up and organize the area and start talking to assembly, warehouse and sales about what the schedule looks like for the future. If things are slowing down over all, then it gives us the opportunity to shut down the ovens early, save some money as a company and possibly even do some maintenance work on the oven and track system, or do another lean event.”

But this is not the end of the story. Lean never ends and Oakley and his team know this. The team is already focused on taking it to the next level. “Our entire team wants to hit 5,000 parts in a day. We now have the knowledge and processes to do that. All we are waiting for is an increase in sales. Until then, we will keep our supermarkets full, the customer happy and wait for the increase that will result in a lower Takt Time and the signal to set another record. And it goes without saying that we will always look for a more efficient way to do our job.”
    Argent Global Services Inc.
    (800) 731-6388
    www.argentglobal.com
    Reply 12


Definitions

Supermarket. A controlled inventory that is used to supply a process with the next unit of work or parts for the next unit of work. Supermarkets usually have replenishment signals associated with them to signal automatic replenishment.

Point Kaizen. Improvements made at an individual process step, usually completed in less than one day.

EPE. Refers to the every-part-every interval, which is a measure of process size and length. For example, if a computer system is able to change over and produce all required checks, regardless of type (for example, accounts payable, payroll), during a three-week cycle, then the batch size for each individual check type is three weeks. Thus this process is covering every part every (EPE) three weeks.

Takt Time. The rate or time in which a completed product must be finished to meet customer demand.


Benefits

  • Through the implementation of lean concepts, Pelco’s powdercoat department raised its throughput from an average of less than 800 parts per day to an average of 3,429 parts per day.

  • Once considered the bottleneck of the company, the powdercoat department is now able to process parts arriving from the warehouse quickly, eliminating backlog.

  • When there are no orders waiting to be processed, the powdercoat team cleans and organizes the area.
  • Manufacturing Excellence:Reducing Cost of Failures


    Manufacturing Excellence:Reducing Cost of Failures
    by Praveen Gupta
    January 2, 2008

    Good preparation is required to produce virtually perfect output.


    Sustaining profitable growth must be the mandate for every business in order to create opportunities for employees, value for stakeholders and contributions to the community. Without profit, growth is borrowed, and without growth, the profit margin shrinks. However, many manufacturing businesses suffer from limited profit margins because of lower yields and excessive waste.

    Low yields, poor process flows, excessive inventories and inefficient management systems all contribute to the loss of profits and job loss. But the high failure rate leads to consequential wasteful activities. Product or service failure rate is the key differentiator between good and bad companies.

    My experience has shown that the difference between a superior and the average company may be a 10% to 40% difference in yields. Even a 3% to 5% extra loss in yield can create a competitive disadvantage because loss of yields and cost of handling the loss directly affects the bottom line.

    Almost every company has a quality improvement program such as statistical process control, design of experiments, lean or Six Sigma. Sometimes, these quality improvement programs cost more than the improvement they drive because of incorrect application without paying attention to the intent of the method. Most process improvement teams look for the root cause on the surface and the symptom level. As a result, the corrective action is ineffective and poor performance perpetuates. The process outputs are continually inspected, verified and reviewed.

    We have learned that instead of performing root cause analysis and taking corrective action, if one spends a little extra effort in setting up the process correctly, it pays huge dividends.

    In order to set up a good process, one must create a sense of preparing for the process that involves ensuring good material, method, machine and employee training for achieving the defined target performance.

    We all know the saying, garbage in garbage out, but we still do not ensure good inputs. Planning for the quantities to be produced, as taught by the PDCA (plan-do-check-act) model, is not sufficient. Instead good preparation is required to produce virtually perfect output.

    Spending another dollar in setup can lead to savings of multiple dollars in production, and contribute ‘big’ to the corporate profit.

    There is a caveat, though, to having good preparation. The design engineering team must specify target values for setting up the process. The setup cannot be acceptable—it must be virtually perfect, that is, on target. The challenge setup technicians face is that prints, drawings or procedures define range of values for setup, thereby creating fuzzy targets leading to shoddy products, loss of customers and loss of jobs.

    A small electronics manufacturer practiced the methodology in documenting procedures for their quality management system. They have been able to improve productivity about 3% to 5%. A testing process at University of Military Intelligence deployed better preparation ensuring the necessary material, information, tools, machines, methods and skills were available. More than 2,000 people hours were saved at the testing process. Again, we all know that good preparation pays dividends but we fail or forget to practice it in favor of rushing to finish work and having the mindset of ‘just do it.’

    Thus, it is the responsibility of each and every employee to prepare well for one’s process, be it production or support. To prepare for a task at hand, it is important to ask or know what is needed—which should be captured in processes documentation or work instructions—so one can modify the procedures to ensure preparation is spelled out. Conventionally, the preparation has been left out in order to rush to get to the job to be done.

    We all have seen chaos in absence of improper preparation or the panic to meet the process output demand in absence of process problems.

    Try out your process yourself. Take the current process and add the necessary steps to ensure the good preparation to run the process virtually perfectly.


    Praveen Gupta
    praveen@accelper.com
    Praveen Gupta, president of Accelper Consulting (Schaumburg, IL), helps corporations in achieving excellence and profitable growth. He has published books including Six Sigma Business Scorecard and Business Innovation in the 21st Century. He can be reached at praveen@accelper.com.