Better than Cheese: Plant Trek Day 2

Day 2 - Krakow to Prague

This day started bad and slowly progressed to worse. This was one of our toughest travel days and that is where all of our problem were. We got a late start because a member of our group slept in and we decided to wait for them rather than leave them. I don’t regret the decision to wait but it is unfortunate given the other problems we encountered.

The next big problem was the improper calculation of travel time by Hector and I. We used Google Maps to approximate the travel times between locations and while I still have faith in Google Maps we did not properly account for the slower travel that would occur in a bus versus in a car. Don’t think too poorly of us, we thought of it…it is just that we were way off in our approximation of how much longer it would take.

Boy do I feel like this jackass

Also, when we left there was an abundance of traffic in the city and then on the small country roads we took until we got to the highway. We should have thought of this because the trip yesterday took a little longer than it should have, but we were on small roads for most of that trip and today was supposed to be mostly highway (which it was after the first hour or so).

The third big hiccup was the weather we encountered. Overall, the drive was miserable for the bus driver. Most of the trip had strong winds with some combination of rain, snow, or hail. I tried to get a picture from the bus but it did not turn out.

Once we finally got to ABB (2 hours late and very apologetic) we had a great experience. We walked over to a local business park for lunch provided by ABB. The place we went to typically closes at 1 PM but they held it open for us until we had finished eating. After that we went back to the ABB facility for a presentation by the site manager (a VP in ABB). He kept unnecessarily apologizing for his poor English even though he spoke very well. We all laughed about that later because he was saying he prefers to present in Russian, German, or Czech. So he is apologizing for the performance of his 4th language and most of us cannot fluently speak 2 languages. After an excellent presentation (followed by a quick and fun presentation of humorous/scary safety photos from around the world to lighten the mood) we started our plant tour.

This was not one of his pictures but it gives you an idea

The tour was more or less well done compared to other tours we have been on. It was sometimes chaotic and really the only problem was that their were 43 of us and only 2 of them who could answer questions well in English. We managed though and overall I got a good feel for the factory. Those who had questions would drift towards the speakers and others would wander off and then we would go to the next area.

The facility paralleled the Sikorsky facility in that the areas were at varying stages of the “lean” journey. I put lean in quotations for this ABB facility because I do not think they know what lean is, but some of their new modernized lines do have flow and their was a little bit of standard work/tact time documents. The parallels of the different areas of the ABB plant to the different areas of the sikorsky plant come from the fact that the newer areas were so different from the older area.

I got the impressions from the plant manager, as well as from discussions with other LFMers, that this plant and the Czech people in general are in an interesting time (on top of the fact that the economy has tanked). They used to be some of the cheapest labor in Europe that could still produce a good quality product. That is no longer quite true in that their are some other countries farther east that are cheaper and can produce at a similar quality. This has left them with an identity crisis because they used to get by on cheap labor alone and now they need to become more efficient. Sounds like the starting chapters of any lean book you read. This is the conflict they need to spurn change. Hopefully they use this opportunity.

I found this picture while searching for something else and i just laughed because this ABB facility was in Brno. What we saw of Brno was nice but once I found it I just had to add it to the blog.

After that we got on the bus and headed to Prague. We are staying in a very nice hotel in downtown Prague (no more taxis to get to the city center). We did not want to be out late so we went out and got some sausages from a street vendor downtown, stopped by a pub for the rest of the group and McDonald’s for me, and then called it a night. Tomorrow we have a short breakfast reception with ABB senior management for this area and then we will explore Prague.