NU6 6_What pisses you off in the office by GG STR Reg

NU6 6^th idea: What pisses you off in your office? What do you think must be done?

When you visit of engineering, accounting, purchasing, quality assurance and document control center sections in you office, you will most likely notice the blue binders stock in office cabinets, book shelves, on top or under the table of staff. Try visiting the quality assurance and document control center office and you see tons of documents file in folders, book binders. These documents are understandably needed as references and objective evidences which are required by the system. If you are an ISO certified company, it is a requirement that quality records be maintain for several years. Some requires 3 to 10 years retention period. Below is a sample photo of book cabinets and shelves where binders are filed, and this is just one section in your company. It becomes an eye sore to the employees and give bad impression to visitors and customers.

                  Engineering Office                                                              Document Control Center

I would like to propose a new way of storing document and cabinet in one specific location. Cabinets should be design such that it can be anchored to a railing. The railing will be use so the cabinets can be stack and move easily to access documents easily. It can save space and provide good impression to all employees and visitors. An illustration is shown below.

It can also be positioned horizontally with two rows of cabinets moving sideways depending on available space allocated. A good layout coupled with standardizing binders for all departments and systematic way of labeling will surely make a good impression to all employees. Of course necessary safety precautions should be in place in order to avoid people from getting pinned or caught in between cabinets. 3.5

NU6 4^th Idea: New Product: New Laser scanner.

We are now at the last quarter of our 2011 fiscal year. It’s time we switch on our thinking hat and start brainstorming on what project we need to do to improve our operation. I’ve had a long discussion with our industrial engineering manager and discussed how he can improve his time in analyzing our company layout. Since we have been operating for 15 years, we need to create more space with minimal cost.

As part of the learning at this course, I started to ask him what pisses him off. The first thing he said was the time he consumed in measuring the layout of the machine in the floor area and encoding in his AutoCAD. For a 100 square meter floor area, an estimated time to complete the measurement and completing AutoCAD encoding would be finish within eight hours. And this is just the baseline data he need to start arranging the area to see the feasibility of a propose change in layout.

With the emerging technologies on laser and software, I told him that it would be better for IE and engineers to have a new laser scanner that can scan specific area and convert it using new software to become a three dimensional AutoCAD drawing. This would shorten their time to do measurement and encoding. The scan output would already give specific measurement of machine dimension, floor area, and distance between machines. The engineers would now have additional time to examine and provide recommendation faster than traditional way. Come to think of it, would a new camera provide a much faster time and have the same output instead of laser scanner. Hmmm….

Regards,
Gerry Gutierrez
Development Engineering

First Sumiden Circuits, Inc
Light Industry & Science Park
Cabuyao, Laguna, Philippines
Tel. No.+632-757-7001 to 7006, loc 254
Fax No.+632-5194030 to 31
Email:  gpgutierrez@fsci.com.ph

NU 6 New Business Idea by GG, Str Regis

New routine and business Idea:
Biking and Bike courier system
A few months
ago, I've bought a new road bike and added a routine in my schedule,
biking.  Every Saturday morning I try to
ride at least 40 km along Daang Hari. It's a road built in 2004 connecting Las
Pinas to Bacoor, Cavite,
San Pedro laguna and Muntinlupa. I bought the bike as alternative exercise for
badminton and basketball when I was diagnose with an ACL tear on my right knee.
There are
lots of benefits in biking and this includes getting you sound and fit.
1. Weight reduction: A 30 minutes biking let you loose 230 calories. With proper bike fit and position, you strengthen your upper body and legs because of the continuous movement of legs. It does not strain your knees and feet as  it does not carry your full weight, less stress is achieve. Off course you have to wear safety apparel such as helmet, proper cycling shoes, gloves and protection from heat and proper hydration. It is a means of working out to reduce those excess weights. It also contributes to one's overall health by increasing cardiovascular fitness, strength, endurance, flexibility, stamina and maintaining body balance.
2. Cost Savings: It saves you from doctor's visit, medications and expensive treatments.
3. Recreation: It allows people to go to different places and meet other people, socialized. You can also encourage your family to go out and become fit.
4. Environment friendly: Apart from maintaining good health, you contribute a lot to the environment because you save on gas, oil and maintenance charges if you use car. You contribute to reduction of carbon emission from cars.

One business
idea that biking can do is to have delivery system or bike courier system. It
can help solve environmental issue because of no carbon emissions. It can
deliver fast compare to delivery cars or vans as it can avoid heavy traffic. It
can help provide job opportunities. Though it may have limited items that can
be carried or delivered, it is advantageous if you need to deliver documents or
small packages, urgent notes and messages that need to be delivered in short
distances. Instead of driving a car or courier vans, you do not have to worry
about encountering traffic, looking for parking spaces. Maybe we can see again
those boys delivering newspaper, only this time it is not newspaper. We can
innovate by partnering with small enterprise where they can outsource a part of
their logistics in delivering small items or documents. With the internet
technology, the bike courier system may have small rate of success, but
probably understanding micro-market may provide opportunity. There will always
be room for improvement. 3

NU6 3: New Process at Work: Automation by GG STR REg

New process at work: Automation

In FPC manufacturing, majority of the process is labor intensive. It involves a lot of mechanical inspection using low power microscope, punching processes using 35 ton press machine and pasting processes using jigs and lamination equipment. All process is done by operators and inspector who load, inspect and unloads FPC to particular equipment. A typical FPC backend process is shown below.

Figure 1. FPC Manufacturing: Backend or Lower Process

To be more competitive, our group has been task to look on automating our process. We are now looking into automating pasting and punching processes. Automating the process maybe easy because of the available technology that we have, but if you consider the cost, then it becomes difficult. A typical cycle time of pasting process is about 30 seconds. The process includes picking a stiffener to be pasted into a jig, taking the FPC and removing adhesive separator, loading the FPC into a jig and activating lamination equipment. Manually, the operator use jigs with guide pins and insert the stiffener and FPC in the guide holes. The accuracy of registration should be within 100 microns; otherwise the product will be rejected. The task, automate the process and improve the cycle in less than 30 seconds. Whoosh. The idea is to automate picking and placing the stiffener automatically in the jig, loading the FPC after removal of separator, and laminate the FPC and stiffener. Once you have the concept, you must now assess the cost and benefit of the investment.

I think this is where entrepreneur thinking on being innovative and creative comes into play. An entrepreneur does not have to own a business to become one. He must have the passion and interest to create things and improve the task assigned to him. The operation must be effective and efficient to justify the investment.

The advantage of automation aside from utilizing less manpower is the consistency of process output and faster cycle time. If trouble occurs on the process, equipment troubleshooting and repairs are easy. For labor intensive process, human error sometimes can be very difficult to correct. The disadvantage of automated system is the high cost of equipment and requires big space. But that is one objective of the entrepreneur, to innovate and create new ideas with less or no cost at all. 3

NU6 2 - What pisses you off at the mall?

Hi Prof Jorge,

Below is my second NU6 idea.

Regards,

Gerry

What pisses you off at the mall? What do you suggest?

Long lines, this is what pisses me off at the mall. There are specific stores in the mall that have long line almost all the time. These are fast food outlets such as Jollibee, KFC, Chowking and Mcdonald and restaurant like Pancake, Shakeys, Pizza Hut and Max Fried Chicken. There is that one time where you will experience that irritating moment where you feel you need to shout at the people to hurry up.

One time I was in a lane at a fast food outlet with three counters that are all full. I was on the seventh row after I counted the number of customers from the cashier. After 20 minutes, the customer in front of me was now at the cashier. Instead of telling the cashier what she will order, she went through the list of all the food items on menu, does not decide until five minutes are over. Finally she decided to buy a value meal.  What! We have been waiting for about 20 minutes and she did not even bother to check what she will order. This long line would even double on holidays such as Christmas or at the beginning of school year. If you want to be comfortable and do not want to experience these long waiting lines, then you go to expensive dining restaurant where customer satisfaction is part of what you're paying. Just make sure that you have enough cash to pay for this premium service. But for those who can not afford this expensive place, something must be done to improve the process.

If you have been to BPI bank, they have improve there customer waiting time in line by putting electronic machine where clients input there transaction and the machine will provide you with your queue number which specify your completed transaction. As your number is called, the teller already knows what your transaction is and a few seconds more and you're finished.

My idea is to install a pre-order system electronically like the system of BPI. Fast-food outlets can install a number of machines where customer key in there order and comes out a queue number. Once your number is called, you pay to the cashier and your order is done. No more waiting in line. It is like automating the order system and improving cycle time. In restaurant, each table can be installed with an "ipad" like machine where customer key in there order. Once completed, the waiter can approach you and confirm your order.

There are many advantage from this, faster cycle for ordering process, less waiting time from customer, no idle time from restaurant waiter or crew. Interaction with customer is still present because order will still be confirm personally. Installed gadget on tables can be use for promotional activity or attraction for target customers such as kids and teens. It's like real time-on line ordering system. 4