Mr. Johnson is a ambitious hotel/motel owner looking for innovative and inexpensive ways to make his guest's stay more enjoyable and memorable. Mr. Johnson understands the importance his customers having a positive overall experience at his establishment. His hotel/motel is not just a bed and a shower. His hotel/motel is a place where business men and women call home when away from home. His hotel/motel is a place where families call home when away from home on vacation. Mr. Johnson understands that, much like at home, it's the little things that can matter most. Fresh flowers in lobby, newspapers delivered to the door in the morning, freshly brewed coffee every morning in the lobby, and a friendly smile on the face of the desk clerk upon every guests arrival are all standard procedure for Mr. Johnson. But what else can he do for his customers?
What does a bad day look
like for him?
-unhappy guests due to the amenities provided (or not provided)
What is he afraid
of?
-these unhappy guests decide to never stay at his hotel again.
What keeps him awake at
night?
-these unhappy guests spread the word of their unhappiness and more and more people stop staying at his hotel.
What is he responsible
for?
-he is responsible for the overall customer experience
What obstacles stand in her
way?
-He does not have a huge budget to spend on a full service kitchen
What does this person want and
aspire to?
-he aspires to manage larger more prestigious hotels
What can we offer this
person? (Elevator Pitch)
Our new product Mini Muffin Cookie
is exactly what we would like to offer you. For the innovation hotel manager who is looking to easily prepare a quick and easy welcome gift for his guests. Mini Muffin Cookies are prepackaged, frozen cookie dough that is ready
to bake the moment they are taken out of the freezer. Unlike traditional
prepackaged frozen desserts, Mini Muffin Cookie dough comes in a disposable,
oven-able, plastic mini-muffin tray that fits nicely in a toaster over. The unique shape of the cookies creates a
delicious combination of harder exterior with a soft gooey center. In just 20
minutes, 12 Mini Muffin Cookies go from frozen to cooked, and the plastic tray
can be recycled or thrown away. You will have aromatic lobby and a delicious dessert for all your guests to enjoy.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Saturday, September 22, 2012
The A3 Report: Practical Tool or Common Sense
Leave it to the Japanese to develop a visual/pictorial method of problem solving. This tool does a wonderful job of organizing and documenting the problem solving process.
The idea is to identify the following items...
1) Identify the issue
2) Describe the current problem
3) Identify the desired outcome
4) Root cause analysis
5) Propose countermeasure
6) Action plan
7) Follow-up
The regular usage of this tool will certainly hone your skills at problem solving and root cause analysis. Certainly this is more useful for complicated issues, however, for those unfamiliar with the method it is good to utilize the tool on smaller problems first. After some time, user of this method will likely naturally follow this progression without formally capturing the details on an A3 Report. This sort of process becomes second nature and documenting the process becomes a tedious product of the process.
The documentation of learned results and the learning process itself is a critical part of any manufacturing environment. Many times a problem my be resolved on the assembly line in an emergency effort to push product out the door, but the resolution is never formal captured in a formal report. The analysis was done and successfully implemented, but what if the same problems happens again in two months. Will we remember how to fix it again, will the same people be working on the line and recognize the problem? Without a proper report it is likely that when the same problem arises again the analysis (or at least some of it) will need to be done again. This wastes time and money.
Documenting the problems and issue that arise allows the organization to learn and be able to react faster the next time it happens. Without documentation and learning the same mistakes will likely happen over and over.
The name "A3" is quite fitting as well. I worked for a Japanese company for 9 years and they would send reports in A3 format. Reformatting it to Letter would almost always mess up the report. Be forewarned....if implementing the A3 Report in the western world your report will likely never print properly.
The idea is to identify the following items...
1) Identify the issue
2) Describe the current problem
3) Identify the desired outcome
4) Root cause analysis
5) Propose countermeasure
6) Action plan
7) Follow-up
The regular usage of this tool will certainly hone your skills at problem solving and root cause analysis. Certainly this is more useful for complicated issues, however, for those unfamiliar with the method it is good to utilize the tool on smaller problems first. After some time, user of this method will likely naturally follow this progression without formally capturing the details on an A3 Report. This sort of process becomes second nature and documenting the process becomes a tedious product of the process.
The documentation of learned results and the learning process itself is a critical part of any manufacturing environment. Many times a problem my be resolved on the assembly line in an emergency effort to push product out the door, but the resolution is never formal captured in a formal report. The analysis was done and successfully implemented, but what if the same problems happens again in two months. Will we remember how to fix it again, will the same people be working on the line and recognize the problem? Without a proper report it is likely that when the same problem arises again the analysis (or at least some of it) will need to be done again. This wastes time and money.
Documenting the problems and issue that arise allows the organization to learn and be able to react faster the next time it happens. Without documentation and learning the same mistakes will likely happen over and over.
The name "A3" is quite fitting as well. I worked for a Japanese company for 9 years and they would send reports in A3 format. Reformatting it to Letter would almost always mess up the report. Be forewarned....if implementing the A3 Report in the western world your report will likely never print properly.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Seven Sources of Innovation
Peter Drucker defined in his book “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” seven classes of opportunities. He named these the "sources of innovation"...
- THE UNEXPECTED
- INCONGRUITIES
- PROCESS NEEDS
- INDUSTRY AND MARKET STRUCTURE
- DEMOGRAPHICS
- CHANGES IN PERCEPTION
- NEW KNOWLEDGE
I work for company that manufactures custom hermetic housings for the microelectronics industry. My entire industry was built from NEW KNOWLEDGE. The birth of the microprocessor made the housings we make essential. Without our housings the microchips and other components would be exposed and could get damaged.
When the PERCEPTION of consumers CHANGED about how they would communicate with each other created much innovation in my industry. Packaging an component manufacturing have to keep up with the the consumer demand for data. The more data we consume with our HD TVs, iPads, iPhones, Kindles, WiFe hotspots, etc the faster data transfer devices we need.
High end electronics historically was used by the military but as the DEMOGRAPHICS changed to include academia and business users, the popularity at usefulness of them grew. As people grew accustom to such electronics they blossomed into the commercial arena.
NGK Sparkplugs took advantage of their INDUSTRY AND MARKET STRUCTURE in the early 90s as Intel's Pentium processor was introduced. NGK is an industry leader in the sparkplug business which uses a ceramic based insulator. This ceramic knowledge tranferred well into the ceramic substrate business and they made millions packaging Intel's and AMD's early processors.
The invention of the IC in the 50s quickly led to the PROCESS innovation of thermalcompression bonding. It was imperative to be able to connect these new IC's to the circuit boards. Now we have automated machince that can process thousands of wirebonds per minute.
We are constantyly dealing with INCONGRUIETIES in our business. Our customers want a smaller package that has more I/O (ins and outs) and can dissipate more heat. Although difficult, our industry as developed many ways to pack I/O into smaller and smaller footprints and the utilization of various metal alloys and brazing methods allow for strong heat dissipation.
The microwave over was an UNEXPECTED invention by Ratheon Corporation. An engineer in the 40s was working on a new vacuum tube called the magnatron. He noticed his nearby lunch was "cooking" while he was working on the magnatron. He finally detemined that the low level microwaves from the tubes were causing the cooking. Raytheon developed the Radarange and put it to market in 1947.
Friday, September 7, 2012
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