I’m writing this post from Austin, Texas where our class is spending the weekend after an awesome first week of plant trek. We started on Monday in Seattle visiting Boeing, went to Phoenix on Wednesday to see Amazon, and LA on Friday to see Amgen. This coming week we’ll see Dell and Cisco in Austin before flying to Raleigh to see Novartis and then Detroit to see GM and Ford.
It has been an excellent opportunity to see some world class operations with a bunch of other people who really love this kind of stuff. We also have Professor Shoji Shiba, a world renowned Total Quality Management expert with experience observing hundreds if not thousands of operations all over the world. His perspective has helped us all see something knew.
Here is a run down of what we have seen so far:
Boeing – We had the opportunity to see two Boeing production facilities. The Everett, Washington facility, which produces the 747, 777, and the new 787 Dreamliner, is simply enormous. It is very impressive to see a building with assembly lines full of jumbo jets. We got to walk through in-process planes and see some of the assembly operations up close. That night we got to tour the Dreamliner Gallery building which was built to help customers make design decisions when ordering a new 787. We got to take turns sitting in a mock cockpit, and saw all the configuration options for seats, equipment and interior designs.
The next day we went to the Renton, Washington plant where the 737 is assembled. This building was also very impressive and the operation had more of an assembly line feel. Site leadership talked to us about their lean journey that started in the 90’s and continues today. It was amazing for the class to learn that the 737 model has been so popular that the plant has a five year backlog.
Amazon – We visited a fulfillment center in Phoenix, Arizona to get a look at Amazon operations. The building was about 600,000 square feet and very well laid out. It was obvious that Amazon has taken 5S principles to heart throughout the organization. We walked through the process while Amazon leadership described their impressive throughput rates and focus on continuous improvement. I was also surprised to learn that they develop all of their own software internally to enable their process. The importance that Amazon places on leadership was obvious during our time in Phoenix and our class was grateful that so many operations leaders were able to spend time with us. Amazon flew in approximately eight senior leaders (many were LGO alumni) to share their stories with us.
Amgen – Our next stop took us to Amgen headquarters in Thousand Oaks, California which is about forty minutes from Los Angeles. We toured their large corporate campus where they showed us how operations support the development of new drugs and produce product for clinical trials. At their headquarters, Amgen has a pilot plant capable of making many different types and batch sizes of test products as well as a fill and finish plant that packages product shipped in from other facilities for use in clinical trials. We also saw the impressive quality labs and a hand pack and ship operation for delivering product to hospitals performing trials all over the world.
The other huge benefit of the plant trek trip is how much time we have to hang out together as a class. We have a number of stories and adventures from the past week including a late night swim in the pacific ocean and a four man epic Las Vegas road trip. Many others have said plant trek is the high point of the LGO experience and I can definitely see why.
