Unintentional surprisesWhat a weird evening.
I decided to go out and have a couple drinks after finishing things up for today. As I was going out the door, Sarah and the boys were coming back from Lazerstar in Camarillo (and dinner). They completely startled me as I was heading into the garage (after turning out all the lights in the house, I open the garage door and one of my kids friends is standing right there in front of me).
So anyway, out I went to our local Elks Lodge to have a couple drinks and mingle with people who don't spend all day thinking about computers (it's nice sometimes to talk to people who aren't geeks -- it helps keep the balance).
I ended up in a very interesting conversation with my friend David Pearson (he got me into the Elks). He was explaining how his company Frank Stubbs Company, was expanding itself and making itself more flexible. David is a natural speaker; full of passion and can go on at length about things they've done over the years to get better, mistakes they've made, etcetera.
Over time, they've had to get and maintain all kinds of certifications. They have experience working as an OEM, and with doing custom SKUs and a thousand other things that sail right over my head. He was also explaining how they've changed things so the floor supervisors can collectively make better decisions; it seems like they get a lot more information about orders ahead of time (by removing all the middle management) and by keeping them in the loop on inventory. Here, David has something really interesting to say; raw numbers don't work automatically. By creating simple charts that show some combination of orders, popularity, parts inventory and a couple of other things the floor leads are now able to make good decisions early on about manufacturing schedules, while maintaining a high degree of flexibility. They're now seeing far less problems with jobs being suddenly interrupted to deal with an un-anticipated emergency which makes everyone happier.
They are also constantly looking for new markets that map to the manufacturing experience they already have. What they've been doing over the last few months is to find new opportunities, and make small test runs at it. If it doesn't work out, that's fine and they move on to something else.
After listening for a bit and asking a lot of questions, I told him about Agile Software Development and said that he seemed to have hit upon one way for small(ish) companies to do in manufacturing what many of us are trying to make happen in software. I called it Agile Manufacturing, and I think that's an apt term. From a quick check, many others agree with me.
I also talked to him for a bit about search engines and weblogs, I'll have to see if I can push him in that direction. I'd love to read about it...
As that conversation wound down, Annie (David's wife) asked me to throw a dollar on the table. I knew we were getting ready to gamble on something and normally, I don't gamble, but it's just a buck. I went to a casino once (I spent my $5 at a casino on the island of Curaco, that was it). I've driven through Vegas before but had no reason to stop. I've played poker at a few parties, and come out about even (my wife likes it more than I do). I think I avoid gambling because I am cheap and hate to lose. I will participate in bowling sidepots, although I have not been doing so this year (I'm still not quite right, although I'm getting closer after taking nine months off because of an elbow problem). Anyway, we played some sort of dice game. You start by rolling five dice, you need a 6-5-4 to have an eligible score, the other two die counts as your score. You need the 6, then the 5 and then the 4. You get three rolls (pulling out numbers you've already hit). I managed to win the first round or I might have ducked out (already lost a dollar, time to go).
After about an hour, everyone was leaving and I walked away with $24. I don't think I've won anything like that since back in the years I used to play pool for money. Weird evening indeed!
12:32:53 AM 
|
