Posts tagged: complexity

Process flexibility in steel plants

This post is an edited excerpt from my the­sis “Strate­gic and oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ties in steel pro­duc­tion”. You can down­load a full PDF here. Capa­bil­i­ties that fol­low from flex­i­bil­ity on the machine level become more impor­tant when a steel plant is pro­duc­ing a wide prod­uct range and pro­duc­tion vol­umes are low for each vari­ant. Setup costs […]

Monday April 12th, 2010 in , , , , , , | No Comments »

Polluting ships prevent global warming

The Inter­na­tional mar­itime organ­i­sa­tion (IMO) is about to ban the high sul­phur con­tent fuel burned by most of the world’s ships today. Accord­ing to New Sci­en­tist this will reduce sul­phur diox­ide (SO2) emis­sions will by as much as 90 per­cent, and with them the result­ing haze of sul­phate particles.

Thursday March 18th, 2010 in , , , , , , | No Comments »

How small batches improve product development

The idea of lean prod­uct devel­op­ment (LPD) came nat­u­rally when lean pro­duc­tion evolved into the more gen­eral con­cept of “lean think­ing”. Prod­uct devel­op­ment is dif­fer­ent from man­u­fac­tur­ing because, as soon as you tar­get non–trivial devel­op­ment tasks, they will con­tain a degree of risk that intro­duces vari­a­tion. You can’t remove this vari­a­tion, because eco­nomic rewards in […]

Sunday March 14th, 2010 in , , , , , , | No Comments »

Learning to love complexity

How hard can it be to design and oper­ate a great  man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­duc­tion sys­tem? After all, the indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion has come off age by now… it’s a process that started more than 200 years ago, right? Well, I bet you know just too well that in real­ity it’s usu­ally really, really dif­fi­cult to sort out why […]

Saturday February 27th, 2010 in , , , | No Comments »