VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [49]
Jayro nodded, but Murphy was not sure if Jayro was agreeing or he just liked the pie.
“So I’m curious,” said Jayro. “What did Wayne say when you got on board?”
“He congratulated me on my profound wisdom.”
“Twenty-three hours?!” exclaimed Wayne Reese.
“Twenty-three-point-five hours, to be exact,” said Richy, the daylight autoclave manager, reading from the data on the screen in front of him. “You asked for the maximum, sir, and that’s the maximum ‘soak’ time, as we call it. Then there is another spec that calls for twenty-one hours. But the twenty-three and the twenty-one-hour soaks, those are rare.”
Looking over Richy’s shoulder was Wayne’s lead Black Belt, Kurt Konani, who would be working on a more tactical level than Wayne to orchestrate the LSS transformation at the Oakton plant. They were gathered around the autoclave control console, and with them was Jayro Pepps, filling in for Murphy Maguire, who had departed for LSS training. They were attempting to figure out takt time.
“So that’s … fourteen hundred and ten minutes,” said Kurt, raising his thick black eyebrows. “Well, what’s the minimum?”
“Um, let’s see,” said Richy, scrolling through the data. “The shortest is fifty-two minutes.”
“That’s more like it,” said Wayne. “If we could get all the jobs down below an hour, we’d be in good shape.”
“Yeah, this sounds like a job for Six Sigma,” said Kurt. “That spread from fifty-two minutes to … what was it? Fourteen hundred minutes … man, that’s what I call variation. That’s just going to kill us.”
“Excuse me,” said Jayro, “but you do realize we’re talking about a specification here?”
Kurt regarded Jayro with a blank look.
“The range from fifty-two minutes to fourteen-ten is not statistical variation,” said Jayro. “The time spent in the autoclave depends upon the job. If you want the finished product to have the chemical and mechanical properties the customer wants, then you have to leave the material in there for the full fourteen hundred and ten minutes. You can’t take it out quicker.”
The reality of the time differences dawned on the faces of Wayne and Kurt.
“In fact,” added Richy, “there is no variation to speak of within the autoclave itself. Everything is timed and run by computer, and if the spec is for fifty-two minutes, that’s exactly how long the material soaks inside the unit. Each treatment starts and stops automatically.”
“But, just to ask a dumb question,” said Wayne, “how come one treatment takes less than an hour and the next takes almost twenty-four times longer?”
“It’s whatever the good folks in Rockville specify,” said Jayro. “If the chemist in Rockville specifies twenty-three-point-five hours, that’s what we have to abide by. We do not have the authority here to change that.”
“Now, if y’all want to go talk to Rockville and get them to make the soak times all be the same,” said Richy, “that would be just fine by us. But we can’t challenge what they specify.”
“Right,” said Wayne. “Got it.”
“Well, I see what’s going on, but that sure does complicate matters,” said Kurt.
“Let’s drill a little deeper here,” said Wayne. “You said something about these long soaks being rare? How rare are they?”
Richy shrugged and said, “It depends. Sometimes it’ll be three or four months until we get one. Sometimes we get five or six in a week’s time. But that’s very unusual. Actually, that almost never happens, that we would get a lot of them in a short period of time.”
Wayne and Kurt looked a bit relieved when they heard that.
“All right,” said Wayne, “and what’s the norm as far as soak time?”
“The norm? Somewhere between two to four hours,” said Richy. “That would account for ninety-five percent of what we do here, maybe even higher.”
Kurt looked at Wayne and said, “If we calculate takt without these almost day-long soaks, we could live with four hours. And I really think we should just throw out the