VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [53]
Then there were the “green” initiatives – reducing paper consumption, and recycling toner cartridges. Amy had already decided to give the “green light” to these, corny pun intended.
Next were the Hard/Slow projects that were longer term. In the bottom left quadrant was something termed Passive Office Building. Here, Sarah Schwick came out of her near-comatose delivery, and inexplicably began to speak off-the-cuff with some enthusiasm.
“Excuse me,” said Amy. “Sorry to interrupt. But explain more about what you mean by ‘passive.’”
“Right now, in northern Europe, there are houses termed as ‘passive.’ There are no furnaces in these houses. And the winters can be very cold. Yet the houses are warm and quite comfortable in the winter, and cool in the summer even without conventional air-conditioning. They function well because of smart design, with excellent ventilation but also excellent temperature conservation, needing only a small heat exchanger that runs on a tiny fraction of the energy consumed by conventional heating and air-conditioning. Our thought is to use the F&D buildings experimentally to create materials of the future, that Hi-T could manufacture, which might be retrofitted into existing buildings or installed in new construction to make commercial office space passive or semipassive – in any case, to use a lot less energy than currently.”
Amy began playing with her pen as she listened to this. “This sounds like it was made for Hi-T, not to mention F&D. My only question is, why would this be a Lean Six Sigma project?”
“It is a little outside the Lean Six Sigma parameters,” Wayne commented. “It’s not improvement … it’s like a whole new market or something. It’s research and development. It’s … enterprise thinking. I’m not sure how to categorize it.”
“It’s very interesting,” said Amy. “Unfortunately, Sarah, you’re straying from the F&D business model, which is to have a client fund the development.”
“Why do we always have to follow a client’s direction?” Sarah argued. “Why do we have to limit ourselves? Why can’t we take the lead for once?”
“Because the clients pay us,” said Amy. “And if we don’t have a client to foot the bill, we’re putting out a lot of money. Look, I won’t rule out the project, but it’s not for LSS. I think it’s worthy of more fact-finding and discussion. The problem is that I think you’re probably talking about millions of dollars in development costs for a payoff years away. I would have to run that by Winner Corporate to get the authorization.”
“But that’s why, as an LSS project …” Sarah faintly countered, “and with the energy savings helping offset the costs …”
“All right, we’ll talk later,” said Amy. “What else do you have?”
Sarah turned to the pick-chart graphic on the screen.
“Last … and least, sorry to say, is a suggestion I was pushing to reduce waste in the process called the loop. I thought, and some others as well, thought there might be a big payoff here, but I was overruled. Basically, Viktor shot us down.”
“Why was that?” Amy asked. “Why was Viktor opposed?”
“He was – as he always says he is – worried about quality issues. He felt the risks were too great to be meddling with what he feels is a system that works, and the return would be small compared to the risk. We included the project here to show you that it was considered, but it’s essentially dead. Maybe next year …”
Sarah ended on that note. After some discussion, Amy approved everything “above the line” in the Easy/Fast designation.
They then turned to the LSS initiatives at the Oakton plant, and Wayne introduced Kurt Konani to make that presentation.
Kurt used his laser pointer to refer to the huge, butcher-paper value stream map tacked to the wall.
“From our VSM,” said Kurt, “we generated a very long list of potential projects. Let me assure you, we have many, many years of project opportunities