Electricity and Control June 2022

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Optimising complex manufacturing systems

This letter was received from Dr Michael D Grant, ChiefTechnology Officer at CapeTown-based DataProphet, in response to the article titled: What can sport teach us about MRO Procurement? written by Brian Andrew, Managing Director Sub-Sahara Africa at RS Components South Africa, and published in the May 2022 edition of Electricity + Control .

I am always thrilled when I see a fellow MAMIL take the continual improvement lessons from triathlon and apply them to business. Triathlon as a sport is data-rich and is one of the few sports that seems to be raced entirely based on compliance to various physiological performance envelopes. Not dissimilar, if you would, to Statistical Process Control (SPC). Every professional triathlete I’ve met can talk to their Functional Threshold Power (FTP), Critical Swim Speed (CSS), or Lactate Threshold (LT) and how they race with respect to fractions of these quantities. In his enjoyable article, Brian Andrew speaks to quick expensive versus slow-deliberate fixes: it is a beautiful analogy where the author proposes buying a new bicycle over weight loss. The fun, of course, is that the correct answer is always to buy a new bicycle. The sober and more complicated reality is that the solution is neither to buy a new bicycle nor lose weight, and it is for this reason I am writing to you. The complexity lies in the interdependencies between

things we’d really prefer to be independent. Triathlon is a great example of this: where athletes haul themselves through a swim, followed by a bike, finishing through a run. The state athletes experienced in each prior discipline profoundly affects performance in the next leg, as the phrase “the race is never won in the swim, but it’s always lost there” foretells. As to the trick to a faster bike split? Well… the trick is to swim more. The complexity in modern consumer goods is easily appreciated: from richer features to better performance criteria. Tosupport this increasingcomplexity,manufacturing systems have become more complex themselves, either through more production steps or through more complex material transformations. In the case of system complexity, engineers work fervently to decouple production steps within the system by specifying input parameters and output requirements and then aligning these two between subsequent steps. Here are two examples to illustrate this: in triathlon, the

To support increasing complexity in products, manufacturing systems too have become more complex, involving more production steps or more complex material transformations.

4 Electricity + Control JUNE 2022