Category Archives: International

Debugging the New Airbus A350 Jet

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FEBRUARY 21, 2014

The A350's curved wingtips reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency

“A million parts, flying in tight formation,” is how BusinessWeek(Feb.17-23, 2014) describes the debugging of Airbus’ latest new plane, the A350. The European company desperately wants to avoid the kinds of problems that have plagued rival Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. After several production fiascoes, the 787 endured further problems when its lithium-ion battery packs burst into flame. For the A350 to be economically viable, says Airbus, “the airlines need an operational reliability above 99 percent.” That means that no more than one flight out of every 100 is delayed by more than 15 minutes because of technical reasons.

To ferret out the flaws in an airplane, Airbus technicians have come to depend on sophisticated computer systems. These, too, can introduce problems. Like the A350, the A380 superjumbo was designed entirely on computers, but engineers working in the company’s German and French operations hadn’t used the same versions of the design software. When assembly line workers started installing bundles of wires, they discovered that the German software had miscalculated the amount of wiring needed for the fuselage, which had been designed on French software. Miles of wiring turned out to be too short and had to be torn out from half-completed airframes and replaced.  In 2011 and 2012, cracks were found within the A380’s wings, prompting authorities to order the entire fleet to undergo detailed inspection of the structural integrity of the plane. To minimize the chances of that occurring in the A350, Airbus is putting the airframe sections through more than 80,000 simulated takeoff and landing cycles.

But much of the work is done by suppliers, not by Airbus itself. While the company might look to the outside world like an aircraft manufacturer, it’s more of an integrator: It creates the overall plan, then outsources the design and manufacture of the parts, which are then fitted together. “We have 7,000 engineers working on the A350,” says Airbus, “and at least half of them are not Airbus employees.”

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.

The Logistics of Valentine’s Day Roses

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FEBRUARY 15, 2014

Valentine_Rose

U.S. consumers buy the most flowers on Valentine’s and Mother’s Days–and getting fresh roses to market takes speed, the right temperature, and skill. Like all perishable products, flowers require specific temperatures to maintain freshness, without which they will lose their bloom.

Complicating this need for the ideal temperature, flowers travel a long way from field to store reports Supply Chain 24/7 (Feb. 13, 2014). Eighty percent of all flowers sold for Valentine’s Day are shipped from Latin America, with 12% coming from domestic production and 8% arriving from other locations. In 2013, 231,466 1,000-stem-count bushels of roses were imported into the U.S. from Latin America. Most of these came from Colombia (142,000) and Ecuador (79,000).

Shipping starts weeks before the holiday and the best flowers arrive early. The graphic shows the 2-week path of a rose, from the fields of Latin America to the hands of its recipient.

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.

Using Regression Analysis to Forecast Olympic Medals

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FEBRUARY 12, 2014

olympicsHow many medals will the U.S. walk away with at this year’s Winter Olympics? What about perennial runner-up China? Two brothers, writes Fast Company (Feb. 7, 2014), have the answers. Since the 2010 Winter games, the two collected more than 30 datasets and ran regression after regression until they found a model that accurately matched the past two Winter Olympics.  According to Tim and Dan Graettingers’ model, the U.S. will walk away once more with the most overall medals, though it won’t come close to last Olympic’s record-setting 37 individual awards.  China, which only won 11 medals in the last Winter Games, is set to double its haul.

For the final model, the Graettingers found that only four variables consistently predicted a country’s medal count in the Olympics (with an R-squared of .585):

Geographic area – Their best guess is that it may reflect the nation’s population and/or the genetic diversity within the nation and/or the presence of mountain ranges on which to ski and snowboard.  Also, it does separate the relatively larger nations of the world from the many small (geographically and population-wise) island nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

GDP per capita –  It seems to confirm the hunch that nations whose people are affluent can afford to spend time pursuing excellence in sports, while poorer nations cannot.

Value of Exports – This measure of a nation’s total economic power seems to complement per capita GDP.

Latitude of Nation’s Capital –  The further your country is from the equator, the more snow and ice you’ll have – and the more medals you’ll win at sports contested on snow and ice. (We can think of Oslo, Stockholm, or Helsinki).

By the way, no nation from Africa, South America, or the Middle East has ever won a medal at the Winter Olympic Games.  No nation from the Caribbean has either, despite the worthy efforts of the Jamaican bobsled team!

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.