The Company Man, part 3

The accounting department had peach colored walls with white square columns occasionally breaking up the straight edges made by the drywall. These cut into some of the cubicles making them a a little smaller. Henry always considered himself lucky to have not gotten one of those. The people that did never complained, but Henry secretly suspected they wished for more space.

The cubicles were about half a man’s height, so you could sit down and concentrate, but stand up and see who else was in the office. That made tracking everyone else down a lot easier. The only office belonged to Arnold, at the far end.

“Good morning Henry!” Jonah called to him. Henry nodded politely. He liked Jonah. Jonah was a young, upbeat guy who befriended everyone he met. It was hard not to like Jonah. In fact, Henry could not think of anyone in the company that had met and did not like Jonah. He had that infectious laugh and smile that made everyone feel better.

As Henry sat down and started up his computer, Jonah walked over to him.

“Hey, listen,” Jonah started. “Some techs from research were down here just a few minutes ago looking for you.”

Henry rolled his eyes. “They must be new,” he muttered. “They sometimes think that if they come talk to me, it’ll somehow speed up getting their purchase orders, when really it just slows me down.”

Jonah shook his head. “They didn’t mention any purchase orders,” he explained. “They said they needed to talk to you about some upcoming project and asked me to ask you to head over to R&D as soon as you got in.”

Henry wrinkled his nose. He’d never been to the R&D department before. He wasn’t even sure where that was. Plus, he had a lot of work to do that day already. He didn’t want to fall behind. What would his boss think? “Did they clear it with Arnold?” Henry asked.

Jonah shrugged his shoulders. “They didn’t say, and Arnold’s out this week on vacation.”

Henry’s face soured. He didn’t like the idea of R&D pulling him away from his job to help them with theirs and risk getting in trouble with his boss. “This had better be important,” Henry grumbled. With a heavy sigh, he stood and began navigating his way back to the front desk.

The Company Man, Part 2

As Henry pulled into his normal parking space, he paused long enough to look at the new construction behind the main building. It was a brand new research institution, complete with some sort of dormitory. He knew because he’d seen them building small rooms, each with a bathroom, and had helped to process the order for all of the bedding and pillows that they needed for the rooms. It was obvious they were kicking off a brand new initiative, and was confident they’d tell him during the next company meeting, which was scheduled to take place in about three weeks.

Reaching into his wallet, he unclipped his ID badge from the fold and clipped it to his shirt. Hitting the remote lock on his keyfob, listening to the satisfying click of the locks as well as the brief shriek of the horn, he strode confidently to the front door, and held his badge over the security RFID reader, and waited for the beep.

But it did not beep.

Henry glanced done, surprised. He looked at the badget to make sure he wasn’t using his Costco membership card again. No, it was definitely his company issued Previx badge.

For a moment he panicked. He’d been fired! They forgot to tell him and now he no longer had a job! Everyone is up on the third floor right now looking down and laughing their heads off at him for standing there like an idiot in front of the company he no longer worked for!

The receptionist caught his attention and made pushing motion with her hands. He leaned against the door, and to his surprise it opened.

“They’re updating the security system,” she explained with a heavy Boston accent. Henry cringed a bit to listen to her. “Right now nobody’s badge is working. We had to prop open most of the doors so people can still get through, and they posted security guards near all the important areas.” She gestured to the door to his right, which is the door he normally went through after entering the building. “Now go on Henry from accounting,” she said with a smile. “No time to dawdle.”

Henry was surprised that she knew his name, but then glanced down and remembered it was printed on his badge that he’d instinctively re-clipped to his shirt. Taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, he stepped into the elevator, road it to the third floor, and walked to his cubicle.

The Company Man, Part 1

Henry awoke to the sound of a babbling brook. It was his alarm clock. He bought it from a SkyMall catalog a few years ago while flying back from visiting his mother one Christmas. He never really cared for it after it arrived, but was determined to make good use of it because of how much it cost, and how much grief he’d been given when trying to return it. So, even though it made him wake up with an almost desperate need to go to the bathroom, he kept using it, waiting for the day that it might break, and he could get a different one.

Twenty minutes later, he was showered and eating breakfast. He ate  wheat flakes, because the doctors on TV said that it would lower his cholesterol. His doctor had never told him to worry about his cholesterol, which he assumed was because he ate wheat flakes. The TV was turned on to the weather channel.

“Today calls for lots of sun,” the cute weathergirl smiled cheerfully. “Be sure to break out the hat and sunscreen, and get out there and have a great time!”

Henry glanced over to make sure his hat was where he’d left it on the coat rack. He’d wear it on the drive in to work, but did not feel the need for sun screen. He’d be in the office all day. Perhaps he’d eat his lunch outside, but likely all of the picnic tables would be taken by the time he got out there, and he’d have to go back inside and eat at his desk like usual.

After breakfast, he put his dishes in the dishwasher, donned his cap, and headed out to the car. Five minutes later, he sat in bumper to bumper traffic for the forty five minute commute into work.

Work was Previx, a biotechnology firm that specialized in cell regeneration technologies. At least, that’s what Henry read in the press releases the company periodically sent out. He worked in the finance department processing purchase requests and ensuring that nobody tried to use company funds on personal needs. He’d once caught a department head trying to buy nerf guns for all of his researchers. A few emails later, the department head was informed by no one short of the VP of research that he should stick to essential supplies on his purchase requests. The VP did not thank Henry in the email, but he knew that the VP knew that he’d caught it, and was thankful deep down.

Henry was a good employee.

His review each year told him so. The accounting head was always pleased with Henry’s performance. He was always at work early, often stayed late, was willing to work weekends, even ended up losing a couple of days of vacation each year because he did not take all of his days. This earned him a solid 3-4% merit raise each and every year, even in the down times when company profits were down.  Henry could be counted on. He was trustworthy, reliable, and dependable.

Smart part numbering rant

Disclaimer: This topic is not interesting, not even to me. It’s an engineering process rant.

The problem centers around the fact that first principles, while a good place to start, are not good at resolving problems to which first principles have  been applied and repeatedly failed.

In a modern approach to design, you have a team of mechanical engineers working to design parts. You’ve also got electrical engineers incorporating electronics, industrial designers managing the form, marketing guys designing the packaging, manufacturing engineers making sure it can all be produced and assembled in a cost effective manner, and managers to try and keep things on schedule.

There are also software engineers, but this argument doesn’t entirely apply to them, for I’ll leave them out of the example for the moment.

Very early on in a process like this, it becomes evident that every part that is designed needs to have a unique identifier. Otherwise, how do you know what all you need to order and build?

The problem arises when people try to utilize that part number to describe the part itself. Lets go through the exercise of developing a smart part numbering system.

1st design consideration: At least in the US. studies have shown that when the number of digits surpass 10, the probability of a transcription error is greater than 50%. We have an average brain buffer of 10 digits. So, any part number methodology you assign, you’ll want to keep to no more than 10 numbers.

2nd design consideration: The methodology must be simple, and relatively intuitive. When new employees are brought on board, you don’t want to spend hours/days/weeks teaching them how your proprietary method works. For one that’s time that they could be doing work that will make you money. For another, given the transient nature of so many jobs, contractors and new employees are not always enthusiastic to learn a skill that will not make them more marketable to another company. If you have to write a manual on your part numbering system, you’re on the wrong track.

“Now wait a second!” you might ask. “Why not use one of the established part numbering systems already in use for a given industry?” Great idea. Go find one. I’ll wait….

Actually, I won’t. I’ve already written this by the time you’re reading it, and this isn’t a rant to go into the ramifications of reading something that’s not yet been written. What is telling is that companies with massive inventories that have to index millions of unique products have opted to use a system that does not rely in intelligent part numbering systems. Examples: Amazon.com, and McMaster-Carr. Alternately, Stockdrive parts/Sterling Instruments has what appears to be an intelligent numbering system. The numbers are twice as long, and good luck figuring out their methodology. To say nothing of the fact that the part often has multiple numbers, none of which are ever in stock (no I’m not bitter (well, okay, maybe a little bit)).

3rd design consideration: Think about all of the things different departments that I listed previously. Here’s a short list.

If you’re a mechanical engineer: weight, color, material, dimensions, general tolerances, is it an assembly?, is it a part?, is it an assembly but you buy it as a single module that you can treat as a part?, what project does it fall under?, etc.

If you’re an electrical engineer: what is the resistance?, what is the capacitance?, is it a microprocessor?, how much I/O does it have?, how does it mount to a PCB?, what is it’s thermal profile?

If you’re a manufacturing engineer: fabrication method, number of post processes, is it heat treated?, is it toxic to handle?, what is the shelf life?, is it reactive?

If you’re an industrial designer: what is the acceptance of marring, I can probably think of others, but I don’t feel like it.

Okay, lets say you’ve managed to accomplish all of the above. The system is simple, it’s running, people can use it, and learn it quickly. You’ve got 4 screws sized 1, 2, 3, and 4.

But the inevitable happens, someone comes out with a size 1.5, and your designers need to use it. 1’s not strong enough, 2 is too expensive. Prudence demands that you append a digit and create sizes 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0. Hopefully you designed that system to have just 9 numbers this kind of contingency. Sadly, that means you have update every number of every part, which is time consuming and expensive. You also have to pray that it won’t happen again, which it will.

Alternately, you create an exception and make size 1.5 just call it 5. You’ve broken the scheme, though, which means you have to update the documentation explaining how the rules work, with an appendix of exceptions to the rule. This can grow pretty fast, which violates the design goal of simple to learn and intuitive.

A third option, of course, is to not allow the engineers to use a 1.5 size screw because the costs associated with updating the part numbering scheme make it prohibitively expensive. Congratulations! Your numbering scheme has just reduced the profitability of your product. I’m sure that will look good on the performance review.

Smart part numbering systems are traps. They designed like wikis, where people start with a simple setup that is allowed to grow organically over time. It’s another database that’s easy to add data in. You can add more rules and complexity to maintain the original methodology, but the simplicity is lost within just a few generations of the numbering scheme, which can happen in less than a year for fast growing companies. I say it’s a trap because people believe that it’s easy to get the information back out. There’s a method to the scheme, so people can figure out the part number based upon their needs, right?

The more you add intelligence to a part numbering scheme, the more you reduce its flexibility, in terms of part reuse and cost out opportunities. The original purpose of the part number is to give each part a unique identifier. We’ve not even covered the possibility of multiple parts accidentally deriving the same number under an intelligent scheme.

This is a problem no one has ever been able to solve. First principles have been abused repeatedly in this respect. Moreover, the market has moved away from intelligent numbering systems. Consider Google and the internet. Websites are assigned a unique IP address by which to reach them. There is no intelligence related to the IP address and the content within the site. Once you have an IP address, you can put anything there you want. Rather than assigning an intelligent numbering scheme to IP addresses, it’s better to allow for random assignments, and then services like Google will trawl the content and index them for fast and easy searching.

So, when thinking about smart part numbering schemes, remember the words of Admiral Ackbar

Coming Soon, The Company Man

For a long time, I would ride the bus to South Station down I-93. Along the way, while going over one of the bridges, I would look up and see a Kaplan Career Institute, and situated behind it across the street some factory with a giant smokestack. In my mind, the two always got put together, and I started to envision a factory that stamped out middle-aged businessmen with a plain suit and briefcase, ready to walk into almost any large company in the world and start doing work.

This story came out of that.

For fun, I’ve opted to write it in small sections and post them weekly.

My contribution to mathematics

Turns out there’s a pretty simple pattern for multiplying large strings of 9’s together.

Do you see it?

Let’s say there’s 40 9’s on top, and 28 9’s on botton.

The count tells you how many 9’s and 0’s to put in and where.

From the short string, subtract one from the count and start with that many 9’s. Put in an 8. Write as man 9’s are there are more in the longer string than the short. Follow with as many zeros as you had 9’s originally, and finally a 1 at the end.

This is what math nerds do in high school when playing around with their calculator on the bus.

There are patterns for strings of other numbers, but none of them as simple as 9’s.

Doubtless this was figured out several hundred years ago by somebody else, but just in case, I wanted to plant my flag in the ground.