The Randomness of Industry
Hi all,
as someone who has used electronic dice to simulate/direct the movement of goods on a layout (and yes its a small layout - The Randim Stackum & Wrackem" below
The electronic "random selector" is that box with the red button under the warehouse floor at the right), and with over 15 years experience in the steel industry as a production planner (aka crisis manager) perhaps I can debunk some of the objections about the random assignment of what car goes where and when?
One of my jobs was as a steelmake production planner who had to specify the grade of steel to be made by the furnace, whether by caster or ingot route and then organise to have the right stuff get to the right place at the right time by rail inside the steelworks. We are dealing with 300 ton lots of molten iron and steel that often have to undergo several processes before and after the actual steelmaking furnace.
Big industry, including railroading is about repeatability of process and product that makes money like the tick of a metronome. But when things don't go to the 'planned plan', then that's when you as a production planner can pay your salary for many years into the future. What do I mean by this??
Yes, you plan for "stuff" to happen in an orderly and "planned", efficient and least-cost manner and, most of the time you MIGHT get lucky. But the first thing you learn as a production planner in big time heavy industry is that "the plan" is always subject to IMMEDIATE change with NO notice, however much you might wish this to be otherwise. When the plan changes, yes, there is a rationality about it, BUT you have to know the industry to realise what is actually going on. It probably does look like total chaos to an outsider .
This is where the randomness factor comes in. You don't know what is going to "break", where, or when in the process chain, but when it does, you had better have a good Plan B, C, D, & E up your sleeve. Because when you "stop" a major production unit for whatever cause, the cost in $'s/minute can be in the $X00,000's/minute. Your whole plant can go from being cash positive to being very cash negative in the blink of an eye, In the steel industry, this blink is usually associated with clouds of smoke and sparks, damage to plant that has to be fixed in often people-unfriendly conditions.
When things "break" and you can no longer achieve "the plan", you have to react and choose a Plan ??. Often you are acting with incomplete/unavailable information, Doing nothing is not usually an option. As this extra information becomes available, the plan is changed again, offten resulting in changed requirements, like for a different ingot rake to be moved to the teeming pit, rather than the one that was already there, because a different grade of steel is heading that way to be teemed into ingots of a differnt size going to a different customer or part of the plant. Again from the outside this looks like a random move. Sometimes the problem is in a unit before the streelmake shop, but in other cases a failure of a rolling mill well downsteam of the furnace can cause a major plan reorganisation.
Sometimes you have to go with a far more costly plan than you might like. Over a drink sometime, ask me about the time I shipped 8 tons of air on each of 6 semi-trailers over 700 miles? A 'Plan A" had fallen over and this "Plan B" option was the only way I could get the right stuff to a place where it could be rolled in time to prevent the shutdown of a major car maufacturer's engine plant and the subsequent triggering of non-delivery penalty clasues that would have cost the company far more than that freight bill for "air".
Ok, so that was the big end of town, how about for the small end of town - a smaller industry that might be served by an Inlgenook or similar? All it takes is for one part of the plant making ?? to break either mechanically or electrically and then you need to make something else. This may require a different car going to a different destination and alter your preplanned ideal car-spotting plan. You don't know when it is going to break, only that it just has, and the car you have spotted at your warehosue door is now useless until the problem is fixed. But you can load something else until that problem is fixed.
Another thing that can cause an "apparently random" change is a change in the order that the customer wants his product, and, again, saying "NO" might not be an option. See the air-shipping Plan B above. This could also requre a shuffle of the Inglenook deckchairs. Again you didn't know that it was going to happen, only that it just has happenned.
The current JIT (just-in-time) manuafacturing approach with minimal inventory held on site only aggravates the effect of these type of "random" changes. Too often I have seen JIT turn into TBL despite our best efforts (I'll let you work that one out).
In the ideal manuafacturing world, there should be no place for such randomness. But this manufacturing world can be far from ideal. Most of you will have heard off Murphy's Law, where "evrything takes longer than you expect and if anything can go wrong, it wil, at the worst possible time". But when you are a production planner in big time industry or perhaps even a Despatcher/Network Controller on a railroad, maybe it could be a good idea to remember the words of a Mr O'Toole who reckoned "Murphy was an optimist",
