Dear Mc. Donalds

I know, you were once admired globally as a model of organizational efficiency, but we have both evolved since then.

I've been in your place for nearly 20 minutes now.  I ordered a large soft drink because I felt some remorse about coming into your place and using the free wi fi. I paid my dollar, and your underpaid worker behind the counter disappeared without giving me my cup.  I had to wait until someone else made it to the front, which took about five minutes.

Since that time, until now, the alarms in the back that say "you're behind on hash browns" have been going off nonstop. The crew, in the meantime, has been  standing around giggling. There were lines at the registers, and literally, no cashiers in place to take orders.

You are what you are.  We have all evolved..

JIm

Tesla Cars To Have ‘Major Revisions’ Every 12-18 Months

Link to Full Article

Highlights:

Traditional car companies generally offer incremental improvements in the next-in-line version of an existing car. For example, while Ford has been incrementally improving its Mustang since 1963, the car still espouses a design philosophy similar to the original.

According to Musk’s tweets, there are unlikely to be any retrofits — i.e. your old Tesla car’s hardware would not be upgraded to make it come to par with the new version of the car, even if you are willing to pay for the same.

Here's the real sticking point: These auto companies, and auto component manufacturers, use long lived platforms as a way to spread design costs out over time, and also, to do the long term validation work that it takes to not produce rolling piles of unsafe junk.

We will see what happens.

The Root Causes of Anything

I'm working on a book about failure. My motto of the moment is: One person's failure is another person's revenue stream.

I found this chart in a presentation "Human Factors in Aviation" which is a summary of 86 aircraft disasters in North America by David J. Taylor

Complete Article

Causes/ major contributory factor	% of accidents in which this was a factor
Pilot deviated from basic operational procedures	33
Inadequate cross-check by second crew member	26
Design faults	13
Maintenance and inspection deficiencies	12
Absence of approach guidance	10
Captain ignored crew inputs	10
Air traffic control failures or errors	9
Improper crew response during abnormal conditions	9
Insufficient or incorrect weather information	8
Runway hazards	7
Air traffic control/crew communication deficiencies	6
Improper decision to land	6

So is it not clear that these can be grouped into five groups? Human, Procedural, Mechanical, and Environmental, with a side order of Detection Issues?

And of all of these do they not boil down to human, at some point?

Dear Marriott Corp

I tried to make a $500 reservation at your place a moment ago.

When I entered my email into your reservation app, I got an error message because I did not remember my password  because evidently I signed up for your Rewards program at some point. You would have probably made me change my password anyway.

Your app said that you would email my password... But that didn't happen.

So I basically was stuck.  No password.  No way to make a reservation.

I called the 800 number listed on the app. The automated attendant couldn't understand my problem. I asked 10 times  for an operator. The attendant couldn't understand that either. Finally the automated attendant said " let me transfer you to an operator". Guess what? Office closed.  No operator.

Each one of these system failures got me just a little more frustrated.

So guess what? I got reservations at the Hilton.

So you spend millions on advertising, have some nice hotels and do maintenance so people will stay in them, people like me who pay the business rate...

I have my credit card ready to give you money...

And your terrible app cost you the sale.

Now we all know that for every customer that complains, 10 more have the problem and say nothing... So I am ready to say that your screwed up app is costing you $5000 a day and you don't realize it.

Let me know if you need some help solving this organizational efficiency problem.

Jim

Dear Henry Ford

Thanks for having us over for fireworks the other night. I have to say that Greenfield Village is quite pleasant and you must have been proud of it.

I have to think that you, the patron saint of Organizational Efficiency would have done a 360 in the grave at the exit plan.  5000 people trying to get through a 6 foot opening in the dark while stumbling over railroad tracks was just a bit dangerous, not to mention inefficient.

You were not the patron saint of customer satisfaction though so maybe it is understandable, in an ironic way.

Dear Jimmy Johns

I walked into your place in Chattanooga about a month ago. I was looking for a cool, quiet place to get out of the noise of 1000 motorcyclists gathering on the street directly in front of your place. This was at about 7:30 on a Friday night I guess.

Your enlightened managers chose at that moment to move the furniture away from the wall to do cleaning. The entire crew was dragging furniture across the store floor and it was actually noisier than the motorcycles.

The irony is, with this huge crowd out front, you should have been doing everything you could to get people INTO the store. Instead, you were indifferent to customers and internally focused in the face of a potential huge opportunity with a hungry crowd outside.

Good luck keeping the doors open.

Jim

Dear Peoria

I tried to like you. We have a lot in common. River,  industrial, the Drake/Bradley thing, and someone over there is trying to make some kind of alcohol, and it smelled pleasant and yeasty.

At Drake, they taught us that the public spaces in a place tell you a lot about the community. In your case, the public spaces are screaming "Zombie Apocalypse Stay Away. This is our bunker and we are not letting you in".

Here are some photos. Your arena, your new ballpark and the corporate HQ of your biggest employer are all sending exactly the same message. The lone building that was not bricked up or walled over or set up like a fortress was your little old train station, and that was the lone place I saw where there was a pleasant gathering of people. This was all in the most-public-facing one mile area of your town.

It seems like you should be more hopeful.

Later
Jim

Open Letter to Enterprise Rent a Car

Dear Enterprise:

I have to love your business decision to not put a spare tire in your cars anymore. I suppose it shows confidence in the tire industry which shows the progress it has made in the last few decades.

And your further business decision to charge extra for "road rescue" service means that if your car does have a flat tire you make your customers have your cars towed to your place to get them fixed at their expense.

I suppose the calculation you make is that for the time being the number of customers you tick off and will never rent from you again is smaller than the amount you make and save in by not having good customer service.

I guess your risk management people used to work for one of the cellphone companies.

Open Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Home Services

So if I am to get this straight:

Despite me paying about $20K in rent over the next year, and you getting 10% of it (about $2000) whatever you were doing on Monday afternoon was more important than meeting with a potential client.

Well, Sissy, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services will hear of this.

Jim

Honda Recalls 143,000 Vehicles In Japan, Image On the Rocks?

Honda Motor Co. recalled about 143,000 vehicles in Japan after air bags made by Daicel Corp. — a rival of troubled Takata Corp. — failed to deploy in an accident, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The recall followed confirmation Wednesday of a death in the U.S., the tenth involving a ruptured Takata air-bag inflator in the country.

 Link to Story

So many questions.This is the "real" version of something that happens in my you tube story (the iso9001:2015 transition playlist). What do you wager that the root cause is the same? 

Check my YouTube channel www.YouTube.com/getisohelp and click the Transition playlist (the fun starts at about part 15)

Dear AT and T

The crew you had laying the new fiber optic cable today cut through the old one.

Of the 10 or so on the crew none could speak English.

They tried to fix the old fiber optic cable by peeling back the cover, twisting the strands together and taping it.

You have the worst customer service in America but you don't care because we just buy your products anyway.

At some point this will all catch up with you.

What drives an ISO auditor crazy...

There are abundant work instructions all nasty and greasy on a row of welders... But no one has a complete set. No work instruction for machine #1.

"Where is the work instruction for that part?'

The quality manager says "oh, it's on the line somewhere. Maybe at another machine. The official version is in the computer anyway."

"Then why do you bother to laminate some of them, and hang them up out there?"

"Well the engineer is from a well-known Asian country and he is used to it."

"And does it bother him that they are not complete?"

"He does not know the difference. Anyway that is not his responsibility"

"And do you not find it difficult to get your workers to pay ANY attention to ANY instructions? "

"No they have all been here for years. If we want to do something different we just tell them.'

" and so why don't you just take them all down? They are filthy and cluttering up the place."

"The Asians"

"So what if there are some obsolete ones?"

" we try to take the obsolete ones out"

"So these things are for decorative purposes. "

"Basically"

"So is there any impact on quality from all of this?"

"No. In fact 90 percent of our customer complaints have disappeared since they announced the closing. "

"Closing?"

"They are closing the plant. Model year phase out and they don't feel like spending the maintenance budget to bring in new models".

Me (thinking): " maybe, just maybe bad housekeeping or resistance to manufacturing discipline...or spending a lot of overhead money on work instructions that are ignored... Is not a good thing...

Dear Detroit

Thanks for letting me visit without incident yesterday. I made it up Gratiot and down 8 mile without seeing either Eminem or Diana Ross or being held up by zombies.

I suppose there is plenty of whining about how you got into the condition you are in. I go into chaotic places all the time, and the root cause of most organizational decline, whether it be a civilization, a city, or a little machine shop is that you stubbornly expected to be able do the same things that originally made you successful forever. We know how that worked.

So now what? Why does it not get better? The lone answer is: you tolerate mediocrity.  Your citizens are so beaten down that they accept their community being the way it is.

Sorry I can't be more helpful. I do have a suggestion though. Come up with some measurements of effectiveness, and set up programs to improve. Determine what needs to be done, by when, assign accountability, dedicate resources to improvement (rather than stadiums) and do not take "we can't" for an answer. Do not expect the rest of us to solve your problems. Expect commitment  from everybody.  Audit yourself occasionally.

Sound familiar?

http://all-that-is-interesting.com/abandoned-detroit-photos

Pizza Recall

http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/FSIS-Content/internet/main/topics/recalls-and-public-health-alerts/recall-case-archive/archive/2016/recall-024-2016-release

To you and me, five truckloads of screwed up pizza is a lot, but in the grand immensity of the mass produced and distributed food industry it is not even a blip on the radar...

Rental Karma

The service road into the rental car lot here in Houston is not well marked and I found myself in the middle lane needing to turn right.

I signalled in plenty of time for the two cars in back of me to see what I was doing. The closest, an idiot in a silver van, accelerated to get into my blind spot and cut me off. The second, little car of some kind, courteously slowed to let me in.

All three of us pulled in to the rental car lot. The van was forced into a long line at the check-in, but the little car and I were guided into the front of a new row, right in front of the escalator.

I approached the driver of the little car, an athletic young female. "Thank you for courteously waiting for me to change lanes" I said. She smiled and said "I had to get in that Lane myself".

" Your reward for being polite is that not only do you get to check your car in before that guy who rudely cut me off to save two seconds, but you get a shorter walk with your bag."

"Karma" she said.

"Yep. The universe  is in alignment" I responded.

Home   >   Latest Car News   >   Europeans: Beware of Counterfeit Motor Oil

Europeans: Beware of Counterfeit Motor Oil

by Steven Symes  

Posted on Feb 19, 2016

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Ford service technician (Credit: Ford)

It turns out Russians are counterfeiting more than just Ray-Ban sunglasses and Under Armour clothes. Consumers across the world need to be on the lookout for counterfeit oil, thanks to some enterprising young Russians who wanted to make quick cash.
According to multiple reports, the authorities discovered the oil counterfeiting ring operating out of different “abandoned” warehouses in Russia and certain former Eastern Bloc countries like Belarus. They would use slave labor by taking advantage of undocumented immigrants, keeping the overhead low.

Read more: http://www.insidercarnews.com/beware-counterfeit-motor-oil/#ixzz40vHKYGpw

13 GM traffic deaths are tied to a 57-cent part

WASHINGTON (AP) — The fix for a faulty ignition switch linked to 13 traffic deaths would have cost just 57 cents, members of Congress said Tuesday as they demanded answers from General Motors' new CEO on why the automaker took 10 years to recall cars with the defect.

Barra was firm, calm and polite throughout the proceedings. But she struggled at times to answer lawmakers' pointed questions, particularly about why GM used the switch when it knew the part didn't meet its own specifications.

http://news.yahoo.com/13-gm-traffic-deaths-tied-57-cent-part-213613083--finance.html

http://news.yahoo.com/video/owner-families-share-cobalt-stories-151730794.html

So, to be perfectly accurate on this, here is what happened:

GM produced 2.3 million cars, over a decade with a known defect.
There solution to the problem was "tell everybody to get a lighter key chain".
The "fix" for the problem costs 57 cents... so a total of about $1M would have fixed it and solved the problem.
But, for some reason they chose not to do so.

GM recommends lighter key rings after recall

 

The problems in the affected vehicles in some instances allowed the engine and other components, including front airbags, to turn off while the vehicle was traveling at high speed. GM previously had said there were 13 deaths linked to the faulty ignition switch, but revised that to 12 on Tuesday because it had double-counted one incident.

The failure is believed to be caused when weight on the ignition key, road conditions or some other jarring event causes the ignition switch to move out of the "run" position, turning off the engine and most of the car's electrical components mid-drive, with sometimes catastrophic results

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/even-recall-repair-gm-recommends-173601809.html

Mars Food North America is voluntarily recalling one specific production lot of UNCLE BEN’S® READY RICE®

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - February 28, 2014 - Mars Food North America is voluntarily recalling one specific production lot of UNCLE BEN’S® READY RICE® Original Long Grain White Rice product, representing less than 3,500 cases. This product does not meet our quality standards due to punctures in the pouch packaging.

This action relates only to UNCLE BEN’S® READY RICE® Original Long Grain White Rice product with a Best By date of “12/14 MADE IN CANADA,” and with Lot Code 351GBBFPXX printed on the package, where “351GBBFP” is the lot code, and “XX” represents the packaging equipment, and could be any of 1L, 1R, 2L, 2R, 3L, or 3R. No other Lot Codes, or any other UNCLE BEN’S® Brand products, are involved in this action. No Mars Foodservices products are involved in this action.

FDA Website

There are many root causes.

10 cars most likely to go 200,000 miles

For many shoppers, choosing a car that can go the distance is an important way to save money. A new study approaches the concept of longevity from an interesting angle, focusing on models that have achieved 200,000 miles.

Put together by the data aggregator iSeeCars.com, the study was based on listings for 30 million vehicles advertised for sale during the last year. Looking at the model years 1981 to 2010, the company ranked those vehicles based on the percentage that achieved the impressive 200,000-mile mark. Not surprising, most were vehicles that also have had good reliability rankings in our annual owner surveys.     

Moral: The kind of cars that last a long time are the kind of cars owned by the type of people that don't drive their cars very hard.  What happens if you have a nice old car, like a Mustang, for example, and don't drive it very hard....

http://autos.yahoo.com/news/10-cars-most-likely-200-000-miles-213000133.html