VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [99]
“Yes, I know. The so-called soak time can range from fifty-two minutes to twenty-three hours, or whatever. The scheduling software in WING4-L is supposed to deal with those complexities.”
“But fancy software or not, we know for a fact that the ’Zilla sometimes doesn’t get the material it needs when it’s ready. We know that it sits empty some of the time because the material that is supposed to go into it has not yet arrived in enough quantity to fill it. We know that the ’Zilla is loaded at less than what it is capable of holding and so it runs at far less than full capacity.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. It’s all because of variation upstream. Things not coming through when they should. But we decided it was better to keep the autoclave – the ’Zilla – working with whatever was available, rather than just having it sit there idle.”
“All right, you and Kurt made that decision. But once the door on that unit is shut and locked down, it’s two hours on average before you can open the door again. And if you do open the door too soon–”
“Yes, I know. The whole batch is ruined,” said Wayne.
“So you look upstream and you have maybe ten minutes for each piece being processed,” said Jayro. “And you look downstream and you have twelve minutes from Godzilla to Shipping. But in the middle you’ve got this thing that takes two hours.”
“Pepps, do you think I’m not aware of that?”
“It’s just that we’ve shaved a minute here and a few minutes there. But what does it matter?”
“Ultimately, all these little improvements add up!” Wayne insisted. “Over time, they make a difference!”
“But not this year.”
Wayne let out an exasperated sigh and said, “No, Pepps, not this past year, at least. Now, do you have any constructive suggestions?”
“Well, yeah, I might. Like if we’re going to do this LSS thing, why don’t we apply it where it can really make a difference? Like Godzilla?”
“We did consider Godzilla as an LSS target. Aside from reducing the load-and-unload staff, which we did, there just wasn’t enough waste to justify the effort – not with the funds available.”
“Let me put this way,” said Jayro. “Right now, they’re doing more LSS in Shipping. Kurt was telling me how they’re going to buy this new machine that’ll let them load a pallet quicker. And because it’ll all go quicker, they can eliminate half a worker. I mean, how you cut half a worker, I don’t know, but that’s supposed to save money. Anyway, so what if they make up the pallets quicker? The pallets just sit on the loading dock until the end of the day when a truck comes to pick them up. Like hours and hours. So why put all that effort into going quicker just so the pallets can just sit longer?”
“Ultimately – again I say, ultimately – we will eliminate that waste as well. I don’t know how; I don’t know when. But when we do, Shipping will be ready.”
Then all of a sudden Wayne laughed at himself.
“By then, Pepps, we’ll probably have transporters like on Star Trek, and we’ll just beam the pallets straight to the customer!”
Jayro chuckled and took another bite of his sandwich.
“All right,” Wayne asked, “if making up pallets quicker isn’t a good target for LSS, what is?”
“That snafu that happened this morning – when they had to stop a soak on the ’Zilla in order to start another one. Preventing that would be on my list, probably near the top.”
“Yes, I agree. That was pretty bad. We wasted some valuable material.”
“Wasting the material is bad enough,” said Jayro. “But way worse than that is wasting the ’Zilla’s time. Murphy Maguire used to say that if you waste the ’Zilla’s time, you’ve wasted everybody’s time – everybody in the whole company.”
“In a sense, you could say that about any waste.”
“No, I’m sorry, it’s different here. Godzilla is the only piece of production equipment we have that consistently runs twenty-four/seven. You know what that means? It means that if you lose any of those twenty-fours you cannot recover them – because there are no twenty-five/sevens. There are no twenty-four/eights. If you lose a piece of twenty-four/seven, it goes to next week. And everything