VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [33]
“Your products were part of a retrofit package,” said Tom. “A performance upgrade that I had done. You see the leading edges of the wings? Those are Hi-T composites, made right here in Highboro.”
Amy looked out her window at the curved front of the airplane’s wings.
“Gee,” she said, “I hope we did a quality job.”
“Hope?” asked Tom. “You mean there’s a possibility you didn’t?”
Silence.
Tom checked that the runway was now clear, throttled up, and the engines came to a roar. He released the brakes.
“Well,” Tom shouted as they hurtled down the runway, “I guess we’re gonna find out if Hi-T makes a quality product or not!”
He pulled back on the yoke.
The wings held, as Tom Dawson knew they would, and the plane did not crash. No more was said about quality – although no one forgot about it either. They arrived safely in Rockville, Maryland, a few minutes ahead of schedule, and were soon at Formulation & Design being greeted by a smiling and hospitable Viktor Kyzanski.
Viktor that day was everything that had gotten him to where he was: sharp-minded yet charming, in command of all technical issues, tossing off brilliant-sounding insights about science and business as they went along. He personally conducted the tour of the F&D facilities, leading them through the various labs and showing them a number of “wow” demonstrations that had been set up: a polymer that could be deformed – bent, crumpled, folded – and yet would “remember” its original shape and slowly unfold, uncrumple, unbend itself to become almost flat again in a matter of minutes. A carbon--fiber material that could be heated to 1,000°F, yet would be cool to the touch within moments of being removed from the test oven. A sheet of a composite material called BL-726 that was as thin as a business card and light as a feather, yet so strong that Viktor himself could stand in the center of it when it was placed between two benches, and it would not break or bend.
“Unfortunately, it costs about five hundred dollars per square centimeter to produce it,” Viktor remarked.
The tour took them through all kinds of equipment, most of it boring to look at, but some of it rather exotic in a techy sort of way. And Viktor made a point of introducing a number of his star chemists and engineers. At last, as it seemed the tour was approaching an end, Amy intervened.
“Viktor, thank you, this has been very good,” she said, “but I think what Wayne – and all of us, for that matter – would really like to get a grip on is, what is the overall process? What is the business model here?”
“Right, we need to know what the flow is,” added Wayne.
“The flow?” asked Viktor.
“The flow of a project from start to finish. Just for the heck of it, let’s say that I am the project and I come into F&D … where would I go? In what sequence?”
“Well …” said Viktor. “It would depend. It would depend upon what was being investigated and so on. And the journey could be quite convoluted.”
“Uh-huh, right,” said Wayne. “One of the things that Lean Six Sigma can do is to reduce the convolutions – reduce the distances between processing steps. And when we reduce distances, we can reduce waste and make things happen faster.”
“I see,” said Viktor. “But … if you, Wayne, were the project, you or most of you would be traveling via Ethernet, which is to say electronically. That’s how we move things around here. You won’t find many forklifts in the corridors here.”
“Right. I understand that,” said Wayne, “But the number of convolutions … the number of steps and stages … I’d just like to know what goes on.”
“Of course, and I’d be very happy to explain it,” said Viktor. “And let’s do it over lunch … which is right this way.”
A luncheon of corned beef, turkey, cheeses, various breads, a number of salads, and so on had been brought in from a local delicatessen. This was set up in a first-floor conference room that had window walls looking out upon the woodsy surroundings. Amy took a moment to stare into those woods, and it struck her how insular it was here, nestled away from the rest