Perspective

I'm heading home from my latest trip very soon. (Singapore this time.) I'll need a couple days to get my feet back on the ground, but after that I have a brand new essay to put up, so stay tuned!

Smart Shoppers Everywhere, shop at...

What kind of freight?

As strange as it may seem for air freight to go by truck, I think it would still be faster than waiting for flights right now. (I had the misfortune of picking a time and place to fly that corresponded directly to a national weather service thunderstorm warning.)

Quote of the unspecified temporal interval

True Blue Sam just referenced this quote. I think it's particularly appropriate considering the earlier post.

"For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail."

-- Benjamin Franklin

Fixed?

I know that necessity is the mother of invention, but these must be the red-headed step children.

Miss Me?

Once again, I'm back. Since my last significant post I've spent about 2 weeks in South Africa and some time in Ohio, but I'm back at home for about a week!

I'll be putting up a few posts soon, Starting with a brief essay I've been contemplating for a few months: The Mundane Detail

The Mundane Detail

If you’ve seen the movie ‘Office space’ then you probably remember the scene when the three main characters discuss how their money skimming scheme has gone awry and discover they will probably be going to prison. Michael, reveals what has given them away…

“I always do that. I always mess up some mundane detail.”

Yep, $300,000 and a prison sentence, traced back to a ‘mundane detail’

It’s the sort of thing that I have encountered too often. People don’t place value on things that seem simple or ordinary, but these are the things that often end up being important.

Shortly after I began my job, I was given a bit of advice. I was told that in spite of all the calculus and differential equations I had been taught in school, that the most important math skills to have were basic counting skills. Why? Because no matter how well you design parts, if you don’t order enough of them you’ll be throwing your work away. I realized this style of thought applied to many other things as well.

Here are a few examples.

It’s common for engineers to design a just few parts of a much larger system, in fact it is typically necessary because few people have the knowledge necessary to design an entire machine from the foundation up. One of the many problems arising from this is that incompatibilities may arise in a design. It’s worse yet if the parts cannot be tested, except at considerable expense.

In my first case, the parts being designed had to be taken overseas for testing. When they arrived, it was found that they were missing a feature that they required. It was a simple feature; three lines and a little text on the drawing would have solved the problem. But the parts had already been made when this was discovered. Even worse, tickets had been purchased, promises had been made to customers, and machines had been shut down in preparation for the testing. Three lines could have cost quite a lot of money if it hadn’t been for a stroke of luck in having a good machine shop nearby.

The second situation isn’t quite so nice. It involves a million dollar piece of equipment to be used as part of a much larger machine. It takes considerable work to properly install one of these, and there are plenty of other parts that are needed to complete the job. By comparison, these parts are inexpensive. A few hundred dollars worth of parts seems inconsequential compared with the overall price of the unit. If only that were true!

An error resulted in a few hundred dollars worth of parts not being shipped. Those parts weren’t available elsewhere, so when the shipment showed up without them it was a problem. There was no time to get more parts shipped, there was no local supplier, and no simple way to fix the problem. The only way to get around not having the right parts was to spend two days cutting holes in this million dollar piece of equipment while it was on the floor of a machine shop that is better suited to much less precise work. And that’s after waiting a day and a half for instructions from the engineering department, that had to be disregarded in the end because they were apparently not able to fully evaluate the situation from overseas.

The end result was a high potential for a botched installation, two or more days wasted production, and at least a man-week of time and labor thrown away. That’s worth quite a bit more than a few hundred dollars. And of course, whoever packed the boxes for the shipment, probably had no idea of the importance of those parts and the consequences of losing them. If every shipment was like that, he could go on shipping 99% of the parts that were ordered, and still leave all of his customers with a very low rate of satisfaction.

Mundane details like this are like quicksand, you’ll never know there’s a problem until you’ve stepped in it and start sinking. It’s an overlooked detail that partially responsible for my extended stay in South Africa. For what it’s worth, I was not the one who overlooked it, but that’s little consolation since things that aren’t my fault are often my problem.

Of course when forgotten details multiply, then things begin to look less like quicksand and more like a whirlpool. On a recent trial I had to rely upon four suppliers for parts and raw materials. The supplier I dealt with the most received a design which I had carefully checked, and I had multiple conversations to confirm the delivery date and address to insure that everything went smoothly. After all of that, things did indeed go smoothly, but not with the other suppliers.

One supplier made a part with a significant manufacturing error. Either through haste or misinterpretation of a drawing, the part was unsuitable for use without significant modification. (Modification that involved hand shaping metal that is supposed to be made to aerospace like tolerances. Talk about risky business!) That problem was solved, but there’s more.

The third supplier does much of their design work in house, and seldom provides details for fear of losing designs to other shops and therefore losing business. Because of this, it isn’t clear if the design was incorrect or if the manufacturing was simply sloppy with no inspection process. Either way, the equipment had to be jerry rigged to make it work, and as soon as the trial work was done it was boxed back up and sent back for rework. We lost time and the supplier will have to bear unnecessary expenses to correct the error. Still, the trial was still possible, or at least it was until the last supplier put the last nail in the coffin.

It turns out that some material shipped was unsuitable for the trial. Observations in the field indicated that it was probably not what had been promised prior to shipment, and might not have even been what its label said. We scrambled to do a few tests with other material, and we were able to confirm that everything else was working fine, but without large quantities of the requested material, the trial was essentially dead in the water.

All of the errors were simple ones that could have been avoided by a careful look at the parts that had been made or a little extra care in the manufacturing process.

Had I not been through trials like this before I think I would have been completely frustrated with the entire situation. Having a trial thwarted is bad, but having to solve all of the other problems first really adds salt to the wound. Still, there’s nothing to do but make sure everything is corrected then remember what went wrong so you can plan to avoid the problems in the future.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, I suppose it is that details can be simple, and even boring, and yet still be insanely important to your work or others, so try to stay sharp, and don’t overlook the little stuff.

An afterthought: I am not immune to this problem myself. I would like to comfort myself with the thought that the details I miss are more subtle than the examples listed here, but the truth is that nobody is perfect. Of course that doesn’t mean we can’t strive for perfection.

Saturday in the park

On the road

I was sitting in Narita Airport (Tokyo) earlier waiting for my flight home and I decided it was finally time to recap where I had been on this trip. Even these past two weeks it has been quite difficult to get away from the factory for any non-work related activities, so I really don’t have anything new to report since leaving Africa. I suppose that’s just as well though. I’ll need to spend plenty of time in Singapore and Thailand in the near future.

It’s been quite an eventful trip, but mostly because of work related matters. I only had a few chances to go out and sightsee, and that was all in South Africa. Still, it was quite nice and I did enjoy it quite a bit.

In South Africa, the crew was working a cycle of 4, 12 hour days then 3, 8 hour days. I had a couple days off during the month and did use that opportunity to go see the Suikerbosrand nature reserve, which was very close to where I was working.

The Suikerbosrand is a nice quiet place, often favored by hikers both for day or week long trips. If you don’t have the time or the gear for a proper hike, you can always take the tourist loop driving trail around the reserve. The reserve contains most of the mountain range of the same name (which in turn is named for a type of shrub found in the area.) The mountain range doesn’t exactly measure up to the Rockies, or even the Appalachians, but if you consider that most of the region is a mile high to begin with then the peaks are pretty high up. And the views are certainly impressive.

The whole region is highveld grassland, meaning that it’s a very arid, somewhat prairie like environment with few trees and plenty of grass fires (which are often allowed to run unchecked if they do not threaten an inhabited area. Combine that with the red soil, and it looks like Arizona with tall grass.

This particular region has basalt (igneous) inclusions into a sandstone (sedimentary) layer. Consequently, over the years, the softer sedimentary rock has eroded away, leaving rather prominent peaks and ridges made of basalt and a thin layer of soil.

The higher regions of the reserve have relatively limited wildlife activity, because they are so dry and sparsely vegetated that there is little cover and less food for herds. Of course if you get close to a watering hole, then you usually see quite a bit of wildlife.

In this reserve is mostly populated with eland, wildebeest, and zebras. Occasionally you will see some Hyenas, but you don’t encounter large animals like elephants and rhinos or predators like lions. Of course this lack of the most dangerous African animals probably explains why there are so many hiking trails in the area.

I did get to see one predator while I was in Africa though. One of the local wildlife officers stopped by the factory to show some friends a ‘little’ tiger cub.

It played just like an ordinary house cat, but I would really hate to get it mad even at a fairly small size like this.

I did get one extra treat on this trip, thanks to a colleague at work. South Africa was using steam locomotives in regular operation as recently as the early 1990s. Occasionally you might find one in use, but the only time they are really seen now is when they are being run for railfan excursions. Luckily for me the railyard for Rovos Rail, a company that specializes in running regularly scheduled steam excursion trains, is just North of Johannesburg.

This coworker and I took a few hours on an afternoon when work ended early to go see the railyard and the Pretoria railway station. The station was quite an incredible piece of work. It was registered as a historical landmark for many years, but was recently burned down (arson, I’m sure) and had to be completely rebuilt. The rebuilt version is quite beautiful, and since it had an old steam locomotive on the platform we stopped in to look at it and take a couple of pictures

We talked our way onto the platform and I was about to snap a photo, when a Metrorail official on a power trip stopped us and said that we were not allowed to take pictures of the locomotive without first getting permission from the marketing department. His line of ‘reasoning’ was based on the idea that images of the engine could be used in a negative manner and hurt the tourist trade as well as their standing with local customers. Never mind the fact that the marketing department was closed that day and that the locomotive had been built decades before any current railroad employees were even born. So rather than having a cheerfull comment and a photo of a steam engine, I now have a story about how an official of Metrorail was simultaneously uncooperative, illogical, and rather rude.

Thankfully, the day did not end there. The people at Rovos rail know how to promote tourism so when I stopped by the yard I got to take pictures of their locomotives from the inside and out. After a nice chat with Mr. Rohan Vos (the head of the company) we were free to roam around the yards so long as we didn’t go into the engine shed and distract the men working there. So I managed to snap a few nice shots before being chased inside by a thunderstorm.

A fun as it might be playing with tiger cubs and running around nature reserves with a camera, I have finished (for the time being) my work overseas, and now I am back in Chicago. The weather is much nicer than it was when I left. (It’s not sunny, but it’s not bad.) Of course it has been a while since I was here. The last time I saw the Chicago skyline, there was still quite a bit of ice and snow on the ground.

It should be nice to be back in town for a while. Of course, it is a bit of a switch considering some of the places I have been lately.

One month later

No, I have not been eaten by lions, trampled by elephants, or swallowed by a crocodile. (I was however, laughed at by hyenas.)

I've just spent a month in a place where checking my email usually involved checking for a dial tone. I have now left South Africa for Singapore where I will be spending a few days before continuing on my way.

The trip so far has actually been rather nice, though far from relaxing. South Africa was rather enjoyable, though I won't go into the details just yet.

I have some photos to share and will post them in a couple of days when I get a little time away from the factory. I the meantime, I will leave you with this.