We are very sorry to report that Jon Griffith will be leaving LGO and SDM this month to take another position at MIT. Jon will be working on a program to start a new University with SIngapore called the MIT-SUTD Collaboration. As you all know, Jon has been an integral part of the program, and we will all miss him. Please join me in giving him our deepest appreciation.
The new class has been off to a great start and showing enormous enthusiasm for the program and our activities. You will be hearing from many of them as we start working on this year's cycle of plant tours, internships, and seminars.
I was out in Southern California and had dinner with six alumni. I hope to do something similar in visits to Switzerland and Northern California later this summer.
Donald B. Rosenfield
Senior Lecturer, Sloan School of Management
There is a great new resource available to Sloan alumni. The purpose of "Innovative Thinking" portal is to provide timely, relevant content to MIT Sloan alumni, including the best practices, academic research, and books coming from Sloan. Check it out!
TopThe 2010 Conference, "Operations Leadership in a Global Economy" is only four months away! It will be held on October 14-15 in Miami, FL. The planning team is excited to announce that the following speakers are already confirmed, and more are on the way!
Neal Asbury, entrepreneur, Chief Executive of The Legacy Companies
When it comes to advocating on behalf of entrepreneurship and free enterprise, there is no one more passionate about these topics than Neal Asbury, chief executive of The Legacy Companies. It’s no coincidence that he was the 2008 recipient of the coveted United States National Champion Exporter of the Year Award. He has published over 100 articles on global trade issues, and been quoted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LeMonde, and has appeared on network television nationally and internationally. Each week Neal hosts the nationally syndicated talk radio show "Neal Asbury’s Truth For America", produced by Atlantic Radio Network and syndicated around the country. His book, Conscientious Equity: An American Entrepreneurs Solutions to the World’s Greatest Problems, has been acquired by Macmillan Press, one of the world’s largest publishing companies and due to be in bookstores the fall of 2010.
Mr. Asbury’s www.asburysworld.com blog is quickly becoming a favorite on-line destination for visitors who share his passion for small business entrepreneurship and the benefits of expanding the U.S. role in global commerce. His advocacy has taken him to address the United Nations at the Commission of Trade and Development, as well as frequent speaking engagements at universities, government events, and trade associations. Mr. Asbury has been an entrepreneur involved in global business since graduating from Rowan State University in New Jersey in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He moved to Asia in 1981 to represent the interests of a number of U.S. manufacturers throughout the region. In 1987, he founded Asbury WorldWide which became the largest American Export Management Company in its segment, with twelve distribution facilities around the globe. In 1989, he began FAB Asia, Inc. in Manila, Philippines, which was the exclusive Asian fabricator of commercial kitchens for McDonalds as well as other well-known American restaurant chains.
After selling his group of companies in July of 1999, Mr. Asbury established Greenfield World Trade which is a global Trading Company selling and servicing American manufactured products in over 130 countries to both the retail and commercial markets. He further acquired J. Cobo, a distribution company with operations throughout Latin America; General, a manufacturer of food preparation equipment; Zeroll a manufacturer of high end kitchen gadgets, and Omega, a manufacturer of electrical kitchen appliances. No stranger to Capitol Hill, Mr. Asbury has received the E-Star Export Award and the Export Achievement Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce. He is a founding faculty member of Export University (a collaboration between the District Export Council and the U.S. Department of Commerce). He is the chairman of the Export University National Oversight Committee. He is vice chairman of the District Export Council National Steering Committee and chairman of the Florida District Export Council, appointed to serve by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. He is a member of the International Advisory Committee to Governor Charlie Crist of Florida and a member of the prestigious International Policy Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington. He has testified before the Philippine Senate on multiple occasions on foreign trade.
Gilbert Fiorentino, CEO, Tiger Direct:
Gilbert Fiorentino co-founded Tiger Software in the early 80s in Miami with 3 employees. Since the "advent" of e-Commerce in 2000, under his leadership the organization has grown into a $3BB multinational direct marketing and e-Commerce giant including the US brands TigerDirect, CompUSA, Circuit City and Misco in Europe. Mr. Fiorentino’s strategies for economic success have included the transformation of a direct mail catalog company into an early player of a multi-brand e-commerce platform to address consumers changing purchasing habits over the last decade. He also led the acquisition of several major electronics brands during a down-turn in the market and leveraging existing brand loyalty for continued sales growth. The combined website traffic of the primary US brands has been ranked at #2 in computers and electronics retailers, similar traffic to that of Best Buy or WalMart.
He has evaluated the retail sector as the Company continued to re-grow the CompUSA chain, declaring a lack of technology implementation at retail. He invented a new concept called ‘Retail 2.0’ which integrates the best of retail and the Internet – connecting over 250 products in each retail location to the internet and providing consumers with product information as they walk through the store or interact with any of the ‘connected devices.’ This patent pending technology has received many industry accolades, including from senior management at Intel and Microsoft—and most importantly, sales results. Mr. Fiorentino is an active member of the Consumer Electronics Association and will be a keynote speaker at the 2010 International CES. He also attends an annual exclusive "CEO" conference hosted by Bill Gates in his Washington home as well as other thought-leader events across the country. Fiorentino also is an adjunct Professor of Business Law at the University of Miami. As an alumni of UM, he is community-oriented and seeks to help nurture our upcoming generations.
The 2010 Conference Planning Team
TopJust a reminder that the July 9 session with Professor Richard de Neufville will be rescheduled for fall. There are currently no alumni web seminars on the schedule. We will be working on the 2010-2011 line-up over the summer.
Remember that podcasts of presentations are available for people in the LGO/SDM community. You can get the podcasts on our past seminar site at:
https://lgosdm.mit.edu/VCSS/web_seminars/past_webseminars.jsp
Log-in for the past presentations, including the podcast versions, is:
username: lgo
password: e40
To subscribe to the feed using iTunes, copy the feed URL: http://lgosdm.mit.edu/podcasts/protected/feed.xml. In iTunes, under Advanced, Subscribe to Podcast, paste the URL and click okay.
As always, to register for future events or to see upcoming seminars that are scheduled, go to:
-------------------------------------------------------
1. Go to https://lgosdm.mit.edu/VCSS/web_seminars/webseminars.jsp
Projects profiled this month are from the recently held the LGO11 Off-cycle Midstream Review. This month we are profiling the projects at Amazon.com. Rob Jackson is working at the Lexington Kentucky Facility and Kuldip Sandhu is working at the Fernley Nevada Facility.
If you have companies or areas of research you are interested in having highlighted in the monthly news please contact Ted Equi tedequi@mit.edu.
Name: Rob Jackson
Company: Amazon.com
Supervisor: Chris Buzard
Academic Advisors: Roy Welsch, Dan Whitney
Title: Amazon Fulfillment Engine Throughput Improvement
Summary: The AFE (Amazon Fulfillment Engine) operation is an Amazon.com proprietary system that enables the LEX1 outbound operation to flow shipments to completion. The system takes a tote of items from the inventory area and sorts them into complete orders. This process requires associates to place items into an individual tray (Induct), then place the item into a chute until a grouping of items is a complete order (Rebin), then verify the order is complete while placing it into a shipping box (Pack), and then seal the box and apply the shipping label (SLAM).
Currently the flow within the system is limited by the cycle times of pack operation. The goal of this project is to focus on the packing of the shipments in an effort to reduce labor costs and increase throughput. We are looking to improve the individual packing rates by 50% YOY (from 275 units/hr to 415units/hr). The project will focus on the pack station to develop ways to ensure consistent work loads into and out of packing, reduce cycle times within the pack process, and improve pack quality.
The intern has developed a way to standardize the packaging of orders by limiting the choices of boxes. The current pack operation requires the packer to keep an inventory of 8 different boxes and package orders into the recommended box size. Removing the variety of boxes and the decision of box selection has shown in testing to reduce cycle times by 30%. Additional waste has been identified that will be eliminated once the work area is standardized.
The implementation of this standardize pack process will be done in 2 phases. On 5/1/2010, 50% of the pack stations will be reconfigured to handle 50% of the volume. After studying and validating the improvement, the remaining pack walls will be reconfigured on 7/1/2010.
Another form of waste that decreases throughput and wastes resources is the unnecessary printing of receipts for each package. An analysis of the historical order data showed that only 20% of orders required receipts. The intern has been working with the systems engineering team to stop the conveyor to insert a receipt only for the required packages. This improvement is expected to be implemented by 7/15/10.
Name: Kuldip Sandhu
Company: Amazon.com (Location: RNO1 Fulfillment Center)
Supervisor: Dave Graybeal (Outbound Senior Operations Manager)
Academic Advisors: Andreas Schulz, Roy Welsch, Chris Caplice
Title: RNO1 Outbound Workflow Management Optimization
Executive Summary:
The RNO1 Fulfillment Center (FC) has several outbound processes to ship various types of shipments. Given the nature of the product mix, backlog, labor, and process capacity, it is important to manage work flow, such that the packages are shipped on schedule to meet customer delivery while the throughput is maximized and the process paths are balanced.
Managing workflow in the facility is a very complicated process that is controlled manually with limited tools, but has large implications on operational performance and costs. The management of flow is rotated between area managers. The flow manager has many key levers to drive various outcomes that can have different impact to overall work flow balance.
The major concerns with flow management and proposed solutions are listed below:
Progress Status:
LGO Blogs--Check out blogs by LGO students, alumni and staff!
MIT LGO Director Don Rosenfield Honored
Manufacturing/Operations Experience Gained on International Plant Trek
Speech indexing company founded by SDM alums Ben Jiang and Cynthia Munoz featured on NVIDIA blog
Workshop in interviewing skills held for SDM students
Applying systems dynamics to global health problems
SDM alum Vineet Thuvara promoted at Microsoft
Annual Systems Thinking Conference to be Held October 21-22, 2010 at MIT (article – conference details below)
The SDM Gospel, According to Ed Crawley
September 14, 2010
SDM Information Evening
Location: Burlington, Marriott
Time: 6–9pm
October 19, 2010
SEAri Research Summit 2010
Location: MIT Faculty Club
Time: 8 am–5 pm
Contact: Donna Rhodes
October 19, 2010
SDM Information Evening
Location: MIT Faculty Club
Time: 6–9pm
October 20, 2010
SDM Partners Meeting
SDM industry partners are invited to review curriculum activities, hear from MIT faculty on relevant cutting-edge research, and develop opportunities for internships and theses.
Location: MIT Faculty Club
Time: 8:30 am–5 pm
Contact: Pat Hale
October 20, 2010
SDM Alumni and Student Mixer
Location: R&D Pub, Stata Center
Time: 6:00–9:00 pm
Contact: Helen Trimble
October 21, 2010
SDM Conference Reception and SDM Best Thesis Award Presentation
Location: MIT Media Lab
Time: 6:00–9:00 pm
October 21-22, 2010
2010 MIT-SDM Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges
Addressing complexity and innovation in energy, health care, sustainability, and service systems
Location: MIT Media Lab
Time: 8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Confirmed speakers include:
For more information or to register, visit the conference website.
TopLGO Student Program site: http://lgo.mit.edu
Log in to the Virtual Community for alumni information, to find other alumni, update your information, or find theses. If you have trouble getting in, contact lgosdmvc@mit.edu, or use the "forgot password" button. If the email address you submit is in our system, your username and password will be sent to you.
Jon Griffith, Operations and Partner Integration
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