Author Archives: AccountMate

Textile Plants Humming Once Again in the Carolinas

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SEPTEMBER 23, 2013

The old textile mills in the Carolinas are mostly gone now. Gaffney Manufacturing, National Textiles, Cherokee — clangorous, dusty, productive engines of the Carolinas fabric trade — fell one by one to the forces of globalization. Just as the Carolinas benefited when manufacturing migrated first from England to New England and then to here, where labor was even cheaper, they suffered in the 1990s when the textile industry mostly left the US. It headed to China, India, Mexico — wherever people would spool, spin and sew for a few dollars or less a day.

But remarkably, Parkdale Mills, the country’s largest buyer of raw cotton, has reopened and is thriving–another indication of the resurgence of US manufacturing, reports The New York Times (Sept. 20, 2013) in its cover story. For example, just last year, clothing maker American Giant was buying fabric from a factory in India. Now, it is cheaper to shop in the US, using Parkdale yarn.

American manufacturing has several advantages over outsourcing. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they are overseas. Turnaround time is quicker. Most striking, labor costs aren’t that much higher than overseas because the factories that survived the outsourcing wave have turned to automation and are employing far fewer workers. Further, monitoring worker safety in places like Bangladesh, has become a huge challenge.

In 2012, textile exports were $22.7 billion, up 37% from just 3 years earlier. That the industry is thriving again is indicative of a broader reassessment by companies about manufacturing in the US. A recent M.I.T. survey found that 1/3 of American companies with manufacturing overseas said they were considering backsourcing some production, while 15% said they had already decided to do so. This means jobs–but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

Eiji Toyoda’s Death at Age 100

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SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

Eiji Toyoda at NUMMI California plant in 1985

Eiji Toyoda, a member of Toyota Motor’s founding family and architect of its “lean manufacturing” method that helped turn the automaker into a global powerhouse, died this week in Toyota City, at age 100. “Toyoda,” writes The New York Times(Sept. 18, 2013), “changed the face of modern manufacturing.”

Toyoda is said to have developed an uncanny ability to spot waste. “Problems are rolling all around in front of your eyes,” Mr. Toyoda once said. “Whether you pick them up and treat them as problems is a matter of habit. If you have the habit, then you can do whatever you have a mind to.”

In 1950, he set out on a 3-month tour to survey Ford’s plant in Detroit, then the largest and most efficient factory in the world. That year, Toyota had produced just 2,685 automobiles, compared with the 7,000 vehicles the Ford plant was rolling out in a single day. Mr. Toyoda was unfazed, bringing back a thick booklet that outlined some of Ford’s quality-control methods; the company translated it into Japanese, changing “Ford” to “Toyota” in all references.

Even as he aggressively expanded production at Toyota, Mr. Toyoda applied a manufacturing culture based on concepts like “kaizen,” a commitment to continuous improvements suggested by the workers themselves, and JIT production, a tireless effort to eliminate waste. Those ideas became a core part of what came to be called the Toyota Production System. “One of the features of the Japanese workers is that they use their brains as well as their hands,” he said in 1986. “Our workers provide 1.5 million suggestions a year, and 95% of them are put to practical use. There is an almost tangible concern for improvement in the air at Toyota.”

The methods Mr. Toyoda nurtured have had global influence, and Toyoda pushed expansion overseas, establishing the company’s joint factory with GM, called NUMMI. There he introduced his lean-production methods as part of a migration of Japanese auto manufacturing the US.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

Robots in Surgery Don’t Always Work

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SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

The da Vinci surgical system

Robotic surgery has grown dramatically, increasing more than 400% in the US between 2007 and 2011, reports The New York Times(Sept. 10, 2013). About 1,400 da Vinci systems, made by Intuitive Surgical Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. and costing $1.5- $2.5 million each, have been purchased by hospitals. On the market for more than a decade, more than a million procedures have been performed with the da Vinci.

But a new study follows a series of reports critical of robotically assisted surgery. Documents against Intuitive have outlined the aggressive tactics used to market the equipment and raised questions about the quality of training provided to surgeons, as well as the pressure on doctors and hospitals to use it–even in cases where it is not the physician’s first choice and he or she has little hands-on experience.

Almost 57% of surgeons surveyed anonymously said they had experienced irrecoverable operative malfunctions while using the da Vinci system. And between 2000 and 2012, thousands of da Vinci mishaps were reported to the F.D.A., including 174 injuries and 71 deaths, according to The Journal for Healthcare Quality (Aug. 27, 2013). Yet by combing news reports and court records, researchers at Johns Hopkins were able to find examples of botched operations that were not reported to the agency. They concluded that adverse events associated with the da Vinci were “vastly underreported.”

Reports made to the F.D.A. represent only “the tip of the iceberg” of surgical complications and adverse drug reactions, says the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families. “The consequence,” she states, “is that little is known of the real disadvantages of the equipment, and the injuries and deaths it may cause, even as robotic surgery is widely marketed to consumers.”

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.