This year’s Defense Manufacturing Conference will be held in Anaheim, November 28 – December 2, 2011. DMC is the premier Defense Manufacturing and Industrial Base Conference in the country with over 1,000 attendees from the DOD, Services, large and small businesses, contractors, Civilian Agencies and Academia. There will be over 220 exhibit booths representing customers, suppliers and Warfighters. The general sessions provide a unique and diverse forum for invited presentations from senior leaders in manufacturing and high-level stakeholders, including the Executive and Legislative Branches of government. Over 25 specialized concurrent sessions are devoted to important manufacturing science, technology, engineering and business process topics.

Munro is a long time participant at the DMC, so please come by and visit Munro at booth number 123. Also this year, Joe Feord from Munro and Associates will be presenting the results of their DMS&T project: “Producibility Modeling during the Acquisition Process for Cost and Complexity Reduction” during the Advanced Manufacturing Enterprise Session on Wednesday Nov. 30 at 2 p.m. 

For more information about DMC 2011 please visit: www.dmc2011.com

The World Trade Group (WTG) American Manufacturing Strategies Summit 2011 held on November 7th – 8th 2011 was a great success. Two highlights were the keynote presentation provided by James Chris Gaffney, Sr. VP Product Supply System – Strategy at Coca-Cola, entitled “Ensuring Long Term Success of Operational Excellence Change Management Process,” and the workshop “Yesterday’s Productivity Tools are not Good Enough Today,” presented by Mr. Sandy Munro, CEO of Munro & Associates. Among other great advice, James Chris Gaffney discussed why change management fails.  His main reasons were:

• Not enough sense of urgency
• Not a powerful enough coalition
• Lack of vision (understanding where the company is headed)
• Under-communication (multiply what you think you need by 10)
• Not removing obstacles (the “B” team – were here before you came and will be here after you leave)
• Not ensuring creation and delivery of short term successes
• Declaring victory too soon
• Failure to anchor change into corporate culture
  

Sandy Munro would be happy to discuss these topics of Change Management and New Tools for Today.  Please drop him an email at smunro@leandesign.com or call 248-362-5110.

For more information about WTG 2011 Summit visit: http://www.manufacturing-summit.com/

Cost Analysis at an All Time High

Recently you can’t go a day without being blasted about how broke the government is, how tight the markets are and how there’s a new, more competitive global economy.  Naturally this gives rise to the question “how can we lower costs and still provide exceptional capability?” One way to address this question is to understand costs better, earlier, more accurately.  Cost estimating or cost analysis has different meanings for different people based on their paradigms or concerns.  And truly, looking at just one aspect of cost and ignoring others can have devastating results.

Munro has been in the cost business for a quarter century.  We appreciate the various levels of cost estimating and the various needs for cost data.  We get that you need early cost estimates for parts and labor, the cost of quality, your risk and range, investment costs, hidden factory costs, total assembly costs, in-house versus suppliers, global labor rates, and machine rates.  We also understand that they need to be accessed by management, finance, manufacturing and engineering.  Munro has created over 180 cost models and maintains extensive and evergreen costing databases.  These tools can be delivered directly to the financial team as well as engineering and manufacturing to improve speed and accuracy for your cost analyses.  Combined with the other metrics in Design Profit, you will be armed with highly accurate risk, timing, and cost analyses from single parts through full rate production.

If you are interested in accurate, responsive cost analysis, call Munro and ask for Dave Luik or Joe Feord at 248-362-5110.

Activities Behind the Names

The people of Munro & Associates bring a wide and varied set of skills and experience to this organization. Although we are spread out from Tokyo to London and points all across the United Sates, this group of men and women are active in their communities and excel outside of the office place.

Matt is an avid clay target shooter.  He has five major championship wins to his name including two Michigan State Championships, is a four-time All-American, and has held a Master classification since the age of 17.

For more information and results about this event please visit http://www.nssa-nsca.org/index.php/nsca-sporting-clays-shooting/find-a-shoot/national-championship/

New to the Munro Report?

If you are new to the Munro Reports, you may want to go back and review some of our previous reports for valuable information.  Last issue we wrote about our newly developed Producibility and Confidence Indices.  The Confidence Index (CI) provides objective measurement to upper management ensuring the team is on track with the level of knowledge and depth of analysis completed to expose risk.  The Producibility Index (PI) provides guidance to your team on how well they are meeting producibility requirements and where to improve.

The Producibility Index is comprised of four groups, as follows:

–        Architecture Elegance

–        Value Optimization

–        Assembly Elegance

–        Quality Improvement

 The Confidence Index is comprised of four groups as follows:

–        Specifications Captured

–        Assembly Knowledge

–        Part Knowledge

–        Infrastructure Knowledge

For more information on the indices and other Munro Reports, please visit www.leandesign.com.