25Seven

Seven Cycles Collaborative

During the past couple months, 25Seven has been fairly quiet, to say the least.  I have lots of reasons—as always.  Fortunately, the primary reason for this radio silence is a positive one; recently I’ve been focused on another blog.  That blog just went live a couple days ago—although I’ve been posting there since September.  The blog is called the Seven Cycles Collaborative. 

 

A few people have already been checking out the CoLab; we’ve received a lot of interest and enthusiasm about the Collaborative project, and some confusion about what we’re hoping to accomplish.

 

Outcome:  Product or Process?

 

As with so many projects on which I participate, the product is rarely the only important focus.  Often times, as is the case with the Seven Collaborative, the process is the point.  The product’s primary purpose is to bring focus to the process, and to get our employees excited about the process; tactile items are often more fun and engaging than process charts and boring conversations with me.  And as a great storyteller once said:   

 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”  - Ursula LeGuin

 

True that.

 

The Collaborative’s focus on the process as our primary measure of success has been confusing for some.  Spectator confusion is probably caused by a cursory glance at the CoLab blog, or from reading just one or two journal entries.  Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to get a complete picture of the Collaborative’s mission by a brief perusal because the project is large—probably too large, moving fast, and we’re making a couple posts a day recently—weekdays at least.  Because of all this, I think it’s easy to lose sight of the overall project purpose.  I’m here to try and explain:

 

Wentworth Institute & Creative Conflict

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking to a class at Wentworth Institute of Technology.  Mark Pasnik, one of the teachers, invited me to talk with a group of 60 architectural students about Seven Cycles.  The group is working on a project called, “Tectonic Implementation:  A Bicycle Production Center”.  Their directive is essentially to:

“…design an innovative center for the production of bicycles…focus on conceptual ideas and design methods… client culture… implications of a site and its context…”

A great project on which to work, no doubt.  Mark asked me to share some of the experiences, successes, and challenges Seven Cycles has had.  In particular, he asked that my primary focus to be on Seven’s:

• Culture
  
• Design
  
• Manufacturing
  

Bike Project: Earth Day Limited Edition – Part III

Here’s the third installment in a series on Seven Cycles’ Earth Day Bike.  The other installments can be found here:

Part I:  Product details
Part II:  Fuel consumption and commuting by bike

In this third installment I describe some of the manufacturing processes we employ, and how they differ from Seven Cycles’ standard production methods.  As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this information isn’t meant to be a “how to” series of posts; it’s not the way to build ecologically low impact bikes.  I’m simply sharing how we went about it—as more and more people have asked for details.  I’ve also learned that we have a lot of room for improvement for future Viridianesque projects.

Within the framework of this low ecoimpact bike project, we had a number of internal and external goals; here I’ll explain another of our primary internal goals:

Welding At Seven Cycles

Welding is cool.  Taking two separate pieces of metal and connecting them in a way that they become one, and they will never be separate again.  For me, that’s manufacturing at its most visceral.

A few weeks ago I was welding in production; it’s been a while since I’d done that.   Some folks at Seven—and maybe a few of our retailers—would say it’s absurd, and even stupid, for me to be welding when I’m supposed to be “running” the company.  So, don’t tell anyone that I was welding; I might get in trouble.

Now, before any customers that recently received Sevens freak out that an inexperienced welder might have welded their frames, I do have some welding experience.  I never kept track of how many frames I welded between 1988 and 1997—and then every once in a while at Seven over the past decade or so.  But, the number is in well into the thousands.

W. Edwards Deming and the Toyota Production System

A few days ago, Matt O’Keefe—Seven Cycles’ production manager—mentioned an online forum discussion about the merits of German versus Japanese motorcycles.  As one might imagine, it was a heated debate.  Somehow, the thread turned to W. Edwards Deming.

Chicken or the Egg

The commenter voiced the opinion—I’m paraphrasing—that Japanese quality and the Toyota Production System—TPS—would not exist, if not for W. Edwards Deming.  Basically, America is fundamentally responsible for Japan’s global leadership in high-quality manufacturing.  It’s an interesting comment; one with which many people would probably agree.

Matt brought up a good point that I had never really thought about before.  Would the TPS exist if not for Deming?  Was Deming the initial spark of TPS?

Made In the U.S.A. vs. Made In China

I was interviewed today by an industry magazine writer. The writer is working on an interesting article that he probably doesn’t want me talking about in any detail—so I won’t.  What I can say is that Seven Cycles was asked to explain why US made bikes are preferable to Chinese made options.  A different interviewee had already defended the position that Chinese and Taiwanese made bikes are superior to US made bikes.

In some ways, this seems like a bit of a silly conversation, or comparison; I believe that most people would agree that US manufactured bike frames are of better quality than the best Chinese frames.  It does seem a bit difficult to argue with that.

Or is it?

Factory Visit: Dedacciai

13-years ago, Dedacciai was one of the very first companies with which Seven Cycles worked.  It seems like a lifetime ago.  They had some of the most innovative steel tubing at the time.  They were also a young company and they were eager to work with a new business like Seven.  They were very supportive of what we were trying to do and it was psychologically helpful to have so much interest from a high quality Italian brand.

Fast Forward About Ten Years...

Operations Management - International Edition

Today we had a visit with a group of students from the EF International School of Brighton.  Since it is a true international school, the class has students from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Italy, France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Kazakhstan, and Portugal.  It sounds like a really interesting school. 

This group is in an operations management class.  Part of their schooling is to work on their English.  They decided to take a challenge by visiting Seven Cycles to understand our Operations Management Strategy.  Even for those fluent in English, Seven’s Ops strategy is pretty near impossible to understand—I certainly don’t.  However, the teacher visited a year ago with a different group of students.  She asked to return so I guess it wasn't a complete waste of their time. 

So, on Friday afternoon, about 25 students arrived.  Because the class is operations management studies, they were interested in nearly every aspect of our production systems.  Of course, we only had a short amount of time for the visit so we had to choose only a few areas on which to focus.  The three areas that seemed most interesting to the group were:

Local Motors

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to meet John Rodgers—Jay, CEO of Local Motors.  He founded and runs a really interesting and very unique car company that shares some similarities with Seven Cycles, mainly the manufacturing intent of building to order—not building in batches.

Jay was interested to visit Seven and see how we implement the Toyota Production System (TPS).  I was equally—actually, probably more—interested in meeting with him and learning about how he is approaching TPS for his business.  I also can’t wait to see his factory soon.  As Jay said, it’s good to compare notes.  Some of the main topics of which we agreed and focused, included:

Lean Rememberance

I received a call today from the owner of a high end bike manufacturer.  He called to ask about Seven’s approach to lean manufacturing and how we have applied it successfully.  He is looking for ways to improve his business and feels that Seven has accomplished some of what he is striving to do.

This might not sound like an unusual call—business people discussing strategies.  However, anyone in the bike supplier world will recognize this situation to be pretty unusual.  The high end bike industry is very competitive; there are a growing number of suppliers looking for larger slices of a shirking pie.

I am flattered that he called to ask for advice.  Before today, I never stopped to think about the fact that I and a few others at Seven were present during the beginnings of the coining of the term ‘lean manufacturing’.  Jim Womack—author of the 1990 book, The Machine That Changed the World—coined the term in the mid 1990s.  'Lean' is essentially an Americanized expression for the Toyota Production System (TPS) that began in the 1940s.