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  • Today's two days of FMEAs

    I'm writing this between lectures and dinner on the first of a 2-day FMEA forum in Osnabrück and I'm trying to figure out what to make of it all. If that opening sentence fails to give the impression that I'm bubbling with enthusiasm or energy from the day, it's because - well, I'm not. Of course, sitting around being talked at isn't the most energising of inactivities itself, but the content shown so far hasn't fired me up in any significant way.
     
    The theme of the forum is "FMEA success stories" - but those stories have been in fact pretty sparse thus far. Two of today's main presentations were about their respective companies' efforts and struggles to implement strong FMEA systems and culture into their workflows. One company gave an update on its mission (now into its fifth year of 'x: unknown') to implement an FMEA software system and methodology into the group. The other gave a shorter overview of how they're getting on (or not) as they make a start on the challenge. The takeaway from these presentations was the obvious: yes, it's difficult to move away from scattered, ineffective but audit-tick-boxable Excel files to a centralised monolith. And, yes, you need executive and management support for such an undertaking. But not even from the company that is so far along the road did I hear a story about benefits. They have basically arrived, but where, and why? I didn't hear any anecdotes about finding otherwise hidden potential failures, about reducing potential quality issues by humungous amounts, anything like that
     
    One presenter plucked up the courage to show his efforts to convince a director to invest in FMEA via the means of monetary value (another key theme of this forum). Our presenter's take was that robust and reusable FMEAs help to prevent project overruns - (on the basis that you won't be validating things too late, and when validated, then with the expectation of OK results), so the most convincing financial metric was in fact time - a shaky assumption if ever there was one, and one that nobody could pluck up the heartlessness to destroy in the Q&A afterwards.
     
    There is a close-knit group of FMEA gurus in Germany, who attend each and every one of these forums. They consult for others, and many of their clients were here, too - so there is certainly a self-appreciative air to the proceedings, of their being a natural and self-explanatory part of the engineering world. Data is less availble. But one guru at least mentioned that his research team studied around 500 FMEAs before and after switching to more robust software and methods: the robuster methods rooted out around 30% more potential failure causes than the older versions. He did proceed to weaken his argument somewhat by stating that most of these were repeat or piffling items, and there was no factoring of the "novelty" problem (would these new causes have been arrived at had the systems been analysed with fresh eyes, albeit using older methodologies?) but at least a couple of the new ones could be treated as being noteworthy.
     

    So - these success stories we're talking about. They are where, exactly?

    There was a presentation on making FMEA meetings more effective by trying to eliminate discussions on rating causes (occurrence and detection ratings), and by highlighting the financial aspect of potential risk - but that's still a very inward-looking process improvement.
     
    A further presentation from two "big" Americans (in the sense of being FMEA-gurus from America) tried to show the differences between the AIAG and the VDA-described methodologies - but that was a thoroughly overblown observation. When I asked if anyone had "raced" AIAG against VDA on the basis of one common design, to test the theory, or even to try and see if one method favoured one type of result over another, the answer I received was an at least nicely succinct "no."
     
    That discussion all boiled down to "it doesn't matter which method you use, as long as you use it properly."
     
    To turn the focus back on success in FMEAs: how can it be measured? Of course, it's the nature of the FMEA that potential failures are thought up, thought out and minimised - and those thoughts involve (or should involve) a lot of internal company knowledge and evidence. So nobody wants to (or is permitted to) talk about specifics - but with the forum having been so entitled, I'd have thought that the organisers would have found a way to try to tell the stories in a stronger way.
     
    Perhaps, though, in the context of such a forum, they felt they were preaching to the converted, anyway, so didn't need to do much "selling".
     

    Click 'Go' to start

    Generally what an FMEA is trying to do with a mechanical system is to bug-check its logic. Perhaps we could consider a better tool from software development (How Google Tests Software, for example), where a model is created that through a multitude of test runs can quickly highlight the potential week points. That would be even more difficult than manually thinking things through - but cleverer. Perhaps that's simply where we stand right now: we're chipping away with post stone-age but pre-steam tools - and doing a pretty decent job of it, we think.
     

    I know, let's look in the FMEA

    A common selling point of the FMEA is its potential (that word again!) to capture a company's knowledge through lessons learned, updates and actions, linking to evidence and reports, etc. I was also sold on that for a while, but right now I'm less confident about it. After the "5 year-mission to explore new worlds" presentation, I asked how many of that company's development engineers use the FMEA software. The answer was: none. Of course expert systems can be difficult to drive, but it seems strange to me to have to rely on external moderators to create the FMEAs, and then on searching through pdf documents to find key lessons learned and design considerations.
     

    Where does FMEA belong?

    Many of the FMEA colleagues I met so far came from Quality Management - which I feel should be the parking spot for completed FMEAs. But FMEAs that are still themselves under development (theoretically in parallel with the *ahem* new product that is gestating)  should reside with the product- or process-development teams.
     
    I raised this point later over beers and dinner: others countered that engineering students don't learn about FMEAs in any meaningful way, so they can't be expected to maintain one as part of their jobs in the same way that quality engineers do: but that's more of a comment on engineering education than on any philosophical decision to shield development engineers from such shudderingly plodding work as FMEAs (to put a negative twist on it).
     
    Go on, have another beer and lighten up
    The key to these FMEA forums is, of course, the networking. Everybody in the field, regardless of product, industry or division (quality or development) has basically the same problems with FMEAs. But few really try to come to terms with what it means, and what benefits the system has. So it was good to meet a few skeptics among the herd who saw the presentations as well-meaning but non-value-add guff, and who also saw the principal value of such forums in the people themselves.
     
    The evening dinner of local Grünkohl and Pinkel sausages in a local Osnabrück brewery (Rampendahl) made for fascinating conversation, especially as I ended up sitting amongst three of the world's key FMEA software developers.
     
    But now, after some noteceable time-hopping, it's time to upload this post, grab some breakfast, and get ready for the onslaught of the second day...
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    Fresh perspectives and fresh air in Detroit
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    → 12:20 PM, Feb 25
  • Fresh perspectives and fresh air in Detroit

    2013-06-12 18.04.06After letting lady Shanghai go first, gentlemanly North America, along with cousin Mexico, took its turn at being trained by a bunch of know-it-all Europeans (and one Australian), who were airdropped into Detroit last week to bring a breath of fresh thinking to the way our product and processes are treated, and to help make this new air the one we all breathe globally.

    (wow, perhaps I should become an industry marketing writer...!)

    As one of the know-it-alls, I have to admit to having felt some trepidation at facing the North Americans. Our regions have been working more or less independently for the last several decades and my fear was that the Americans, with their equally vast but differently tuned automotive experience, would be open only in the expression of their hostility to our ideas.

    Fortunately, that trepidation, whilst not completely baseless (I had my reasons for such thinking), did not crystallise into anything tangible, for the most part. I did notice participant numbers fluctuating during the two days of training, with some key individuals spending a remarkably small amount of time with us, even considering the typical day-to-day calls upon their time, but those who stayed throughout were attentive, asked good questions and kept us going through all the jet lag and windowless meeting room atmosphere with their overall positivity and willingness to learn.

    We certainly brought new ways of thinking (though also some not so new but not fully implemented standards) to the forum, and they weren't dismissed out of hand, as could have been the case. Having the backing of our global management team undoubtedly had a helping hand in keeping the peace there, but I got the impression that what we were presenting made sense and was difficult to argue against. The discussions were mostly about context and capabilities rather than acceptance.

    My own presentations, on the engineering behind our product, and on technical problem solving, were well received, even though my first presentation went well over its allotted time. This really was the breath of fresh air that the team were looking for. Again, discussion was constructive and showed that my American colleagues were learning something that they were keen to be able to implement in their own region.

    Is there a life beyond the office?

    Despite the windowless conference room, which sat as an enclosed island within the sea of cubicles, I have to admit to being quite impressed by our American headquarters. It felt like a rather different company to the one I work at in Germany, altogether more professional. It exuded a quiet professionalism (aided by some careful noise damping, which is fully missing in our offices, and even a soft white noise that is intended to be filtered out by the mind, along with similar frequencies, making the whole thing "feel" quieter).

    There was an excellent canteen, with a sandwich-making bar, main courses, cookies and - the pièce de résistance, a soft-whip ice-cream machine. Coffee was always available from the Starbucks bean-to-cup machines, as were various colas and fizzy drinks (in huge 12 oz. cups), with ice of course also being on tap.

    Alas, beyond the offices and hotel, I didn't see much at all. On first impressions, there wasn't much to entice anybody out of the hotel

    View through my unopenable hotel window
    Room with a view

    , even though I really needed to escape - the windows were welded shut, so it was all aircon air and faintly Soviet-looking corridors. 

     

    Accepting the company transfer from airport to hotel wasn't a mistake per se (it was lovely being chauffeured around in a Lincoln Town Car), but it did mean that I didn't have the flexibility of a hire car this time around - and not having a car there is pretty much fatal there…

    Whilst it was all about the people this time (OK, the people, the burgers and the beers), and making contacts, not having seen downtown Detroit, Birmingham, Rochester or any surrounding scenery, was a bit disappointing. I'll have to do better next time.

    2013-06-14 20.58.25

    Getting to and from Detroit was fine. I was pleasantly surprised by Delta airlines (I'd always heard pretty negative things about them), but the service was very good, bordering on the excessive when the purser came to shake everybody's hand and to thank us all for choosing Delta. On the other hand, I was disappointed by the support from KLM-Delta when my return flight from Detroit was delayed by connecting flights from Miami and Orlando. Alas, they didn't return the favour with us in Amsterdam Schiphol, meaning that I missed my final flight back to Frankfurt.

    That resulted in a jet-lag-groggy four hours in yet another airless lounge and an electronics store, where I managed not to by a new tablet on a whim.

    So - the next training will be on home turf in Europe. Will that be the biggest challenge of them all, trying to enthuse those colleagues in the midst of one of the biggest slumps in the automotive industry? It shouldn't be. The biggest challenge will be turning this initiative into a resource that will be available for all new and existing employees. That's going to be fun, for sure - more on that as and when.

    At least in Europe I should be able to enjoy more fresh air than I have in the past two trainings...

     

    2013-06-10 07.04.01
    Corridors of power

     

    → 9:30 PM, Jun 26
  • Presenting in my pyjamas: to Shanghai, Bangkok and back

    2013-01-21 15.43.18Apart from the opportunity to see some films that I don't normally get the chance to see, long-distance travel lost its allure a long time ago for me. I appreciate different cultures and their food, it has to be said, but getting to experience them on business trips is generally not worth the price of jet lag, lack of sleep and missing the family. I'd rather travel to Kassel than Korea.

    Sometimes, though, a trip can be rewarding in other ways. My recent jaunt to Shanghai was as special as it was exhausting; after many years of learning engineering and the specifics of my job, I finally became teacher.

    To say "finally" isn't strictly true: helping out colleagues with technical questions is a large part of what we as engineers do. We're always explaining things to sales people or buyers (usually in full knowledge that it'll be out the other ear within milliseconds) as well as other engineers. But this was different - I was formally given the task of training our colleagues in the Asia Pacific region how our products work. It was like our own, private, in-company TED talk.

    The background to the training was inauspicious: our colleagues in China had a few eminently avoidable issues (incidences or complaints, whichever word-avoidance euphemism is currently in vogue) that required a lot of effort throughout the company globally to resolve, even though for me the analysis and resolution were fairly trivial.

    Even before the dust settled, the key action that emerged from all of that excitement was that we needed to increase the general skills level in technology, quality and manufacturing - we needed to spend the effort to train 'em up in order to save ourselves and the company a whole load of pain and cost.

    From a business perspective, it was an investment that would result in a positive pay back (or at least a less negative one).

    Getting the admin right is part of getting the product right

    Just getting to Shanghai turned out to be a bigger hurdle than I had expected: cutting a long story short, I couldn't board my flight on the Saturday because what I had thought was a six-month, two-entry visa was in fact a three-month single-entry: I hadn't checked in advance. Whilst I'm proud to call myself an engineer rather than a bureaucrat, it was still pretty embarrassing, as it meant that I would miss the final organisational meetings with the team on Monday.

    For various reasons, I ended up making use of a new rule in China - that you can stop over in Shanghai or Beijing for 72 hours without a visa, as long as your stay is just that: a stop-over. This meant that I couldn't simply fly back to Frankfurt after the training; no, I had to have an interim airport on my itinerary. In this case I was recommended to stop over in Bangkok.

    Fortunately, bureaucrats being bureaucrats, they could only go by the letter of their rules, rather than the sense of them: I was admitted into Shanghai for those 72 hours, even though my return flight from Bangkok to Frankfurt was only two hours after my arrival in Bangkok.

    Sometimes it's great that the law and its ilk are asses.

    What matters is, I got there.

    Presenting in pyjamas

    Because of all the delays in my arrival, instead of having a few days to acclimatise, to organise and to finalise, I rolled up to the conference hotel just in time for my own presentation. And so, without the chance to change into my suit, I wandered up to the front of the auditorium still wearing what I had been travelling and failing to sleep in - whilst not really my pyjamas, they may as well have been.

    Fortunately, that didn't matter one jot.

    Not fortunately, I had practiced my presentation out loud to myself in an empty meeting room back in the offices in Heidelberg. I had given myself the rare chance to test the logic and flow of my presentation before flying, so I knew that I wouldn't be standing there, staring at my own slides, wondering what it was I wanted to say: I heartily recommend the practice of practicing to anyone.

    So, finally I was there, adrenaline flowing as I stood in front of 70 colleagues who were all eyes and ears, ready to listen to what I had to say. Presenting the basics behind what we do and what our customers do with our parts once they assemble them was an enlightening experience. The things I was showing them were what I have lived and breathed at work for the past five years and more. Conversely, my audience really didn't have much of a clue - and they were agog. Those eyes followed me as I talked, as I tried to avoid walking around the stage too much (I do tend to use up the stage) and even as I noticeably faded towards the end: it went well.

    The best of indicator of my success were the questions that people threw at me during coffee and lunch breaks over the next day and a half. For sure, there came many compliments but they weren't empty: they nearly always came with a question. It was this that really told me that they had been listening and were making the first steps towards understanding, namely confusion.

    And the rest is a blur

    2013-01-21 15.43.18That evening, we went out for drinks. The next evening, we went out for dinner and drinks. Early the next morning I had a meeting with Shanghai Volkswagen. That afternoon I flew to Bangkok. That night, I flew feet-first in a business class bed in an A380, to get home in time for breakfast.

    Was that it?

    I'm back in what counts as normality at work again, my temporary rockstardom popped back in the folder where my presentations lie like an unwanted old rag-doll. But, if all goes to plan, it will be taken out, dusted off, given the odd bit of nip and tuck and we'll be back on the road. The idea is that we take this "show" throughout the company; and that's going to be interesting, to say the least. We could say that Asia Pacific was low-hanging fruit. My colleagues there were (and still are) keen to learn, excited in the possibilities that this knowledge will give them when dealing with their customers.

    In North America and Europe, on the other hand, I'm expecting a kind of tacit resistance. They "know it all", have "seen it all before" - even though in my experience they don't talk the right language of our products: I hope it doesn't go as far as apathy - but could well go that far.

    But that's all to come. First of all, I have to get ready for that exciting trip to Kassel, where at least you can see through the air around you.

    Shanghai afternoon

    It's true, though - it doesn't quite have the same ring as Shanghai, does it?

    → 12:58 AM, Mar 3
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