November 2007
Contents
General Notes
Notes from IIE HQ
Region VP Message
Kaz IE Notes
Contact Info
General Notes
-
Our Region web page changed
addresses to
http://www.iienet.org/region/western
-
2008 Region Student Conference at
Cal Poly San Louis Obispo is
currently planned for March 7th
and 8th. Details are
still being finalized with a
pre-conference social event possibly
planned for Thursday, March 6th
at SLO’s famous ‘Farmers Market”. I
can personally vouch that SLO’s
Thursday night Farmers Market is the
‘Best’ event of this type which I
have experienced. Trust me; you
will have a great time. For more
information go to
www.ime.calpoly.edu/clubs/iie
-
National Conference in Vancouver
from May 17th – 21st
Go to
http://www.iienet2.org/annual2/default.aspx
-
National IIE Award Nominations due
by December 1st. Go to
www.iienet.org/honors
Chapter Management – Know your chapter
health status
Every quarter IIE chapters receive a
health status rating of Green, Yellow,
or Red. The health status rating impacts
a chapter’s ability to win IIE awards
and to receive budget from IIE dues.
Professional and student chapters have
slightly different health status
requirements, available through the IIE
Chapter Management Center (professional
chapter health |
student chapter health).
The IIE Chapter Management Center
provides a collection of tools that help
chapter leaders to manage their local
chapter activities including the IIE
calendar, important forms, funding
assistance, leadership development
materials and many other resources:
http://www.iienet2.org/Details.aspx?id=624.
Notes from
IIE HQ
Hope all is well. I have just returned
from a meeting at IIE HQ with our other
Region IE VP’s and wanted to share with
you a few of the updates.
-
Don Greene, our Executive Director
for IIE, discussed the IIE strategic
initiatives and opening a satellite
office in Mexico. Don advised us
how impressed he was with the
development of IIE in Mexico and
commented that the universities and
lab’s were very close to what we
would find in our own universities.
He mentioned that Mexico graduated
around 4,000 IE’s last year which is
over double what we graduated in the
US. Don advised that the job market
for them was also very strong with a
multitude of factories representing
most of our known companies. Don
also advised that China and Turkey
are two additional countries which
are worth watching on the
international front in the upcoming
years.
-
Another topic at the meeting was an
overview of IIE’s six areas of
strategic focus. They included;
Image of the IE Profession.
Education, Training and Knowledge.
Industry Participation. Academic
Involvement. International
Presence. Network of Effective
Volunteers.
-
An hour was dedicated to a topic
near to our own, the Region Chapter
model which all of you made
possible. For those of you who are
new, our Western Region piloted the
concept of including the “members at
large” or IIE members which do not
belong to a Sr. Chapter, and
including them in our communications
and Web conference calls. From
IIE-HQ’s post survey of our Region
membership, the feedback which was
received was positive with several
comments noting that the ‘members at
large’ welcomed the more direct
communication. Several of the other
Regions have adopted our Region
Chapter model and have reported
similar success, especially when
using the WebEx type of
presentations within their state
boundaries. Let me pay everyone in
our Western Region a personal thank
you for supporting us on this pilot.
-
Discussion was also held on a few
administrative items like succession
planning, updates to the IIE HQ web
site and improved communication.
Regarding succession planning,
shortly you will all be receiving
ballots to vote on my replacement.
When this is released, I highly
encourage you to cast your vote.
Many of our Sr. Chapters will also
be setting up their Chapter
elections. Consider volunteering
for a support position within your
local Chapter, I know that your
service will be well appreciated.
Message from the Region Vice President
As all good IE’s, I find myself looking
at continuous improvement opportunities
and am often asked by IE students or
entry level IE’s what do managers look
for in an IE. This led to a discussion
among one of the IIE committees I serve
on (Industry Advisory Board or
IAB) which ultimately led to the IAB
discussing plans to sponsor a track at
the upcoming National Conference in
Vancouver. The details are being
finalized but the basic track structure
will focus on one theme with three
elements feeding into it which involve
what do manages look for when hiring or
promoting IE’s in their organization and
what IE leaders can do to develop and
mentor IE’s to prepare them for
promotions.
To pilot this track, Cal Poly SLO is
planning to have a discussion forum at
our Western Region Student Conference
with various industry leaders to discuss
what managers look for in recruiting IE
candidates from college. We believe
that this will be a great opportunity
for both the Western Region students
attending the event and the IE leaders
in helping to prepare our future IE’s as
they enter the work force. The
additional benefit will be to share the
best practices from our Student Region
Conference with IIE-HQ and our IAB to
include the Vancouver Conference track
which will be open to our Global IE
partners.
If any of you who are industry leaders
in IE would like to be considered for
participating in either of these events,
feel free to drop me a note.
Let me also take a moment to remind you
that our National IIE Award nominations
are now going on. At the Nashville
Conference, one of the nominees which I
recommended (Kathy Kilmer) won the
Minority Achievement Award. Even though
Kathy was honored by her award, you
could not take away the pride I had as I
heard her name called out. Many of us
serve others in our own IE worlds and I
know that many of you know of other
truly outstanding IE’s who should be
considered for the various National
Awards but it takes someone like you to
nominate them to get the process going.
If you have a name that comes to mind
that would deserve this recognition, I
encourage you to log onto
www.iienet.org/honors for more
details and the various National IIE
Awards that are available. As a note,
they are due before December 1st.
All the best.
Kaz
Kaz IE Note: Using 3 Sigma to help a
non-technical operations manager support
an IE analysis
I can bet that a few of you are
thinking, what possibly could have
happened to have a non-technical
operations manager partner with an IE to
support using a 3 sigma analysis.
Background:
One of our clients came to us asking
help in understanding what their optimal
staffing should be for a 7x24 area
support team. The operating manager was
not technical by any means and frankly
was not strong in analysis but they were
outstanding at managing their people,
especially on a 7x24 coverage model.
The challenge came when they were asked
to quantify what their staffing levels
should be over the 7x24 period so they
called on our IE team for support.
Situation:
After reviewing data on what drove their
work, we discovered that the average
support request was less than one per
hour and that the average time to
process the request was about one hour.
Typically this would have resulted in us
recommending that our operating manager
may only need to support one team for
support request coverage over the 7x24
period. What we knew though was that
our operating manager actually had two
teams scheduled and had very distinct
memories of “I remember when we needed
four teams for support”.
This gap from the average of one team to
four teams was our challenge. How do we
help our operating manager understand
the difference from the ‘I remember
when’ factor to what the data was
telling us?
Resolution:
To address the operating manager
concerns, we plotted their average
support requests by hour which showed
the average having one team would meet
the average demand. But we didn’t stop
there. We then plotted the max support
requests to help them understand that we
recognized that they did indeed remember
correctly that on a few occasions when
they needed four teams to respond to
four calls in the same hour. We then
went one step further. What were the
needed support requests if they could
respond to 95% of the requests at any
hour? To address that we went back and
added a 3-Sigma data point and found
that during their graveyard shift, 95%
of the time they kept to under one
service request but during 1st
and 2nd shift they received
over one service request per hour but
did not exceed two.
Since responding to service requests in
a timely manner was our operating
managers core responsibility, we were
able to present a recommendation for an
optimized staffing model of two teams
for 1st and 2nd
shift with 1 team on 3rd as
their base team staffing coverage.
In presenting this to our operating
manager, we took them through our
methodology and started with the 24 hour
format layout. We then reviewed his max
requests per hour to help them validate
their own thoughts and allow them to
acknowledge that there had been four
requests per hour as they remembered,
but that it happened only a few times
during the entire data sample of several
years. We then showed them what the
average requests per hour were which
they actually did know but started to go
back to the max requests line. At this
point we introduced the 3 Sigma line and
asked them how they would feel about
meeting their service level if 95% of
the time they would meet their service
target.
Our operating manager clearly understood
that a base staffing of four was too
high and they also understood that one
was to low. They also understood that
they would be challenged on more than
one support team based on the data. By
presenting the 3 Sigma approach, we
completely achieved their support with
the base staffing deployment and won the
appreciation from their team to
recognize their service commitments.
For IE, it was a win, win with a bonus
of one of our technical operating teams
understanding how IE’s can use basic IE
analysis to represent their operational
and service level needs in a way which
they would not have been challenged to
present on their own.
