IIE Region 7 Archived Newsletter

April 2007

Contents

General Notes                            Region 7 Meet  & Greet  

Region VP Message                    Kaz IE Notes

General Notes 

• IIE National Conference in Nashville on May 19 – 23^rd: Pre-Registration discount ends on April 6^th (http://www.iienet2.org/annual2/default.aspx)
• Chapter Leadership: Chapter Activity Reports (CAR) and Strategic Plans are past due.  If you have not done them, please do so ASAP.  Tax filling is due on June 15^th for the FY from 4/1/06 – 3/31/07.
• Region 7 WebEx presentation planned for Friday April 27^th at Noon PST with focus on Value Stream Mapping overview.  Once confirmed, we will send out a general invite. 
• Check out our pilot Region 7 Web page at http://www.iienet2.org/Chapter/region7/
• Request for 2008 Region Student Conference Host submissions due April 27^th to mchogan@gmail.com and brood728@yahoo.com
   

Region VII Meet and Greet in Nashville

Date:       May 20^th

Location: Room # 208 of the Nashville Convention Center
Time:       Between 2:00 and 6:00

We were able to secure a room in Nashville for a general meet and greet with others in our Region.  If you are a Member at Large, Student or Sr. Chapter member, feel free to set up meetings with your buddies during this time space.  As the date comes closer, Dan, Kyle, Michael, Sarah and I will send an update on when we will be able to lock in time to meet up with you.  This is a great opportunity to gather freely with your peers and put a face to the email.

Message from the Region Vice President

Good day IIE partners in Region 7!  This is my first Region wide e-newsletter and is something which I wanted to do for a few months.  For those who do not know, our Region is the largest in the US with over 2,600 members covering 8 Sr. Chapters making up Aprox. 900 members, 15 accredited universities with aprox. 500 student members and aprox. 1,300 MAL of which 900 belong to the Boeing Corporation.  Your peers span from Montana to New Mexico to Hawaii to Alaska.

So far this year we have had a leadership conference call, a Region wide Web-Cast and have hosted a Regional Student Conference at Cal Poly Pomona in our attempts to bring added value to our Region membership.  From the responses, many of you thought it was a step in the right direction in establishing a connection between us. 

In May, IIE will host the annual national conference in Nashville.  Many of your peers will attend and I encourage you to consider making the trip to this international conference which brings IE’s together.  If you are an up-coming chapter leader, I would encourage you to attend the Volunteer Leadership Training Workshop (VOLT) which is held on May 19^th and 20^th.  The VOLT is a session dedicated to chapter leadership focused on providing the chapters the tools and topics to help them succeed.  http://www.iienet2.org/annual2/details.aspx?id=7756 

I also wanted to acknowledge a few of our IIE peers. 

• San Diego Sr. Chapter received the Silver award from IIE HQ for their great continued efforts with their chapter. Congratulations!
• Cal Poly Pomona recently hosted the Region 7 Student IIE Conference in early March.  Over 120 participated in the three day event which was great, but what was exceptional was the participation from a variety of universities.  In attendance included students and faculty from Oregon State, Cal State San Jose, Cal Poly San Louis Obispo, Cal Poly Pomona (the host), University of San Diego, University of Southern California, Arizona State University, University of Arizona and New Mexico State University.  As part of the conference, several of the schools presented papers in the paper competition with Cal Poly Pomona earning top marks to represent our Region to the National paper competition in Nashville.

Lastly, if you have an IE topic which would like to present to your peers in our Region, we would welcome you sending us a note.  Our goal is to create a series of Web casts for the general membership in our Region on topics of interest.  Our first web cast was on A3 reporting and our next web cast is planned for Value Stream Mapping on Friday April 27^th at Noon PST.  Other topics on the table include; hand held data collection techniques, presentation skills and work management program overviews. 

Looking forward to seeing you in Nashville.

Kaz

Kaz IE Note: Scatter Plots and Explaining Data

To add a little extra value to our newsletter for the general membership, I wanted to create a “Kaz IE Note” section which is focused on topics which came across my IE desk and have found interesting. 

In this edition, I wanted to talk about the use of Scatter Plots and how to frame complex data. 

Background:  An internal client came to use with a request to help them understand over time (OT) within their group.  They were at a higher level of OT than planned but were challenged to understand how to manage it and did not want to mandate “no OT without management approval”.  OT data was challenging to retrieve by employee and more challenging to drill into a per instance basis.  Reports that were available only drove down to a weekly level by employee and was challenging at best to understand.

Approach:  Review OT data over the fiscal year and break it into manageable buckets which the operating front line managers could understand and act on.  Summarize the data at an executive level to highlight key areas of focus.  Bucket the OT in a manner which allowed management to act on or understand.

Methodology:  Pull all OT data by employee and by week into a database.  Group the data by working craft type, front line manager and senior manager teams.  Consolidate each employee into two elements; number of OT weeks and average number of weekly OT hours based on the fiscal year.  Lay data in scatter plots to identify four key groupings.

• Low Frequency, Low Hours:  This is typically the ‘just happens’ bucket.  The majority of the occurrences that are part of business due to typical operational issues. 
• Low Frequency, High Hours:  Typically due to special project work driving additional days of OT to get the task completed on schedule or an urgent corrective issue calling for ‘all hands on deck’.  At times found to be due to coverage of other employees.
• High Frequency, High Hours:  You will find that your operating managers can probably identify this group to an employee name at a glance.  These are the ‘go to’ employees whom front line managers will select for coverage (e.g. vacation, sick, project work, etc.) because they typically (a) know they can do the task well,  (b) are model employees and (c) are willing to take on OT.
• High Frequency, Low Hours:  This is the group to focus on.  These employees pull in an hour or two a day in OT,  nearly every day of every week.  They also seem to fall under the radar if reporting is challenged to identify them.

Discovery:  By displaying the data on a scatter plot, the four key groupings were easily identified and our IE was able to clearly communicate the issue and allow our operating managers to see options for solutions.  Other ‘typical’ reporting tools over whelmed the operating managers with to much data or gave them the same names over and over again which didn’t allow them to see the big picture.  In this format, management and front line managers could quickly understand the impact of the four groupings and develop a tactile plan to address and prioritize the teams without giving out a blanket statement to stop all OT without prior approval. 

Recommendations and Next Steps:

• Review staffing levels for the High Frequency, High Hours group.  Employees who are working the equivalent of one or two days each week may be an indication of under staffing.
• Review individuals at the High Frequency, Low Hours group.  Understand who these employees are and what is driving the daily hour or two OT. 

Summary:

Presenting complex data in a manner which can be understood by executive management and yet usable to a front line manager is a challenge which many IE’s come across daily.  We found that dusting off a scatter plot did an excellent job for our IE to allow constructive conversation around this particular issue, especially when the IE can re-create the charts from a single “entire employee base” level to the individual front line manager team level.  As with all tools and data, there are multiple ways to display and communicate the message and for every conclusion, there can be multiple reasons and exceptions.  But in this case, the data speaks for itself in a way that everyone understood and allowed management action to take place without a mandate which would likely disrupt the work force and result in issues which OT was completely required and justified.