It's Testing Time!

I've mentioned a few times over the past weeks that we've been collecting data for the purpose of establishing an efficient bidding process as well as determining a production pace. Well, I've just finished the collection and assembly of all of the data in an excel file. (For those of you in the office it can be viewed on Genoa's network in the lean folder - I'll email the path to you).

To give you an idea of how much data that is, we've entered data from 18 projects dating back several years. That's data from every unit from each of these projects, roughly 200 units. There were also entrys not associated with units such as quality control and overall project management. Here's a summary of the data entered for each unit:

Project name and number
Unit description or number
Unit type (Bow, midbody, strn etc)
Number of Parts ( 5 categories)
Weight of parts (2 categories)
Unit Volume (3 -4 categories; l, w, h, area)
Hours worked per unit ( regular and overtime)
Hours worked by design function (modelling, assembly, nesting etc.)

Hours worked came from financial reports that Leonard and Darren had the foresight to set up, collecting hours by unit by design function. Parts and weight came out of reports ran from Ship Constructor. Volume information was calculated by opening up each individual unit in Ship Constructor and calculating volume. This volume information isn't readily availble just by opening a drawing so getting it was tedious to say the least. Much less tedious though because of the highly skilled Darren Letto.

Without counting them all that's over 3000 data entries not including the formulas. Very exiting stuff. After it was all entered, it had to be whittled down to manageable levels for analysis, so some combining of units was necessary and some data had to be thrown out because of it's questionable reliability.

So, what now? Well, I think we're ready for a test. Leonard is in Norway (maybe we'll see a blog post from there) so we haven't discussed this but the next step is to run a project bid using the data collected and compare it to what he comes up with using his current method. For now, we'll also use the data to run a project bid on a project that's already been completed to see how it compares to the actual hours worked.

More to come on that later but now I must mention that I'll be attending a dinner tonight where Genoa is being honored as the provincial recipient of the CBDC Business "Award of Distinction" for 2007 by the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Community Business Development Corporations. Leonard doesn't boast about these things so I won't either but I thought you all should know.

Congratulations Genoa, add it to your list of distinctions...and Darren, good luck with the speech.

Ken Hogan
Lean Guy at Genoa