Unbounded

Where the waves touch the shore, and from the clear blue horizon, rode a lady in red; with her trusty white steed, they galloped the shoreline; red bikini and all, she captured the imaginations of men and women alike.

This was being advertised lately in the TV:

“While Roxanne Guinoo is the newest White Castle 69 model, you (the lady viewers) could be the next model, after Glydel Mercado and her! The search is on for the next White Castle 69 model!

Send in your profile photos and compete in the newest, most prestigious search to be the next cheap liquor model where you’d ride on a horse along the shoreline of a beach with nothing but your red string bikini on.

Now, isn’t that cool?

And finally, this just in:

"Six months from now, Monterey would be making their own version of that very same commercial, where they would look for the most gorgeous woman who’d be willing to wear nothing but a string bikini, ride a bull across a grassy field, and model for meat."

Good evening my dirty little city. It’s good to be writing again.

It’s time to do something more impossible than solving world hunger, than boiling the ocean. Tonight, I’ll be answering the quintessential problem that baffled even John Nash.

To solve the incredibly long service times in Mc Donald’s.

How many times have you walked into a sardine-packed Golden Arches and went through the hassle of waiting in line for more than ten minutes, only to realize that you’d have to wait five to ten more minutes to eat your Big Mac because the food that you want still has to be deep-fried (syn. cooked/prepared)?

Now, upon getting your order, paying your five hundred pesos to the cashier (who’s also the person serving you the food), and having to wait another five minutes, because the cashier is short-changed, you lift your tray and you weave through the thick lines and precariously dodge the first rows of chairs and tables, which are frustratingly placed too close to the line.

Well now, I can see that you’re nodding your heads in affirmation. Boys and girls, it’s time to apply what we’re learning in school (you have been listening after all, haven’t you?) and put the shit that’s stored in your ‘noggins into practical use.

Let’s apply Six Sigma and 5S to Mc Donald’s

Of Americans and why everything about them falls short of six

Six Sigma (6σ is a system of practices originally developed my Motorola to systematically improve processes by eliminating defects (wiki).

Defects, on the other hand, are defined as units that are not members of the intended population (wiki). This is statistically defined as having 3.4 defects per 1,000,000 transactions (in layman’s terms, not having more than 3.4 cases of deviations beyond the allowable variance per 1,000,000 products or services). To easier understand the Six Sigma philosophy, here’s a breakdown of the number of defects per million transactions, and where 6σ is placed:

[link]

For our case, we want to improve the number of customers being served satisfactorily in McDonald’s. Of course, in reality, a Six Sigma project should not have the solutions identified yet. For the sake of this post, let’s pretend that we don’t know the solution yet and we’re going through the process together.

DMAIC

One of the key methodology in Six Sigma is DMAIC, which stands for:

Define – which concerns the problem statement, the objective statement, necessary for identifying the problem.

Measure – which is about understanding the process, validating data accuracy, determining process capability, and setting baseline data.

Analyze – which is basically about forming the relationship of Y = f ( X ) + e (of causality), and screening for potential causes.

Improve – which is about determining, validating, and implementing solutions to achieve the objective statement, and

Control – which is about implementing process control methods and monitoring performance to sustain results.

Finally, to operationally define being served satisfactorily is, it is the amount of allowable idle time where a customer starts to fall in line, to transact their order, to receive a set meal (that is prepared consistently x% of the time. This should be another six sigma project), and sitting down to eat the meal. All of these should be done in about 4 minutes. Taking into consideration the maximum allowable variance of ±1 minute, the ideal time should be between 3-5 minutes (prescribed optimum are estimates, for the sake of discussion). Too early, and errors on food preparation, and money changing may arise. Too late, and customer satisfaction is diminished.

The below figure summarizes the macro process model for a Mc Donald’s cashier-cum-crew in taking orders (sorry for the grubby resolution).

[link]

The process begins with the cashier clearing the serving area of clutter from the previous transaction, prepares the tray, and takes the order from the customer.

The cashier then double-hats into a crew role and gathers the order list from the serving bay.

Three control points are first being asked in the general process: 1. does the order contain drinks? If yes, the crew proceeds in preparing the drink. 2. does the order contain sundaes? If yes, the crew proceeds in preparing the sundae, and 3. does the order contain food that needs to be cooked? If yes, the crew instructs the mess crew to prepare the orders and prepares them accordingly.

After putting everything together onto the tray, the fourth control point questions if the entire order list is accounted for.

The cashier issues the receipt, and the final control point asks if he is short changed or not. Everything easy so far?

Now, another quality improvement methodology that would come to play is 5S.

Of Japanese and why everything about them falls short of five

5S is a philosophy that originated in Japan, and is about the way of organizing and managing in the workplace. The key impacts of 5S is upon workplace morale and efficiency. By ensuring everything has a place and everything is in its place then time is not wasted looking for things and it can be immediately obvious when something is missing (wiki).

The real power of this methodology is in deciding what should be kept and where and how it should be stored.

This dialogue builds good clear understanding amongst a workforce of how work should be done and instills an ownership of the process when done efficiently. It is often, therefore, executed in partnership with standard work, which are operations for which these things are used (wiki).

The name derives from its five principal philosophies in Japanese characters, which all begins with “s”.

SSSSS

The 5S’s are:

Seiri – tidiness, organization

Seiton – orderliness

Seiso – systematized cleanliness

Seiketsu – standards

Shitsuke – sustaining discipline.

Identification and objective statement

As a company, the time duration for serving foods are not meeting the scheduling requirements. Overall, this is causing customer dissatisfaction, layout problems, and manpower deployment issues, as well as resource issues, that are costing the company as much as x in lost revenues and x for unnecessary expenditures per year.

We want to reduce the service time from an average of x to 4 minutes, with an upper limit of 5 minutes. this will meet the current maximum goal of x greater than x percent of the time. The new goal will be achieved by x month and year. it will support our serving efficiency goal (of that darn one time deal of being able to serve a customer in three minutes or less, provided that you take your order late at night and no one else is at the burger joint) and achieve an annual savings of x per month and significant implied projected earnings of x per month.

[End of part one]

Part two will talk about identifying areas of improvement. Again, these are all assumptions as there are no statistical information to establish baseline data.

Part two will also take a look at the macro process and reveal hidden processes that take up time (i.e. the rate at which fries are being deep fried are so slow that customers ordering would have to wait as new batches would have to be prepared to accommodate them).

Finally, part three will talk about applying the philosophy of 5S, in conjunction with Six Sigma. For example, the space between the first row of tables and chairs needs to be moved further from the cashier. More cashiers need to be open for service as too few ones are being used, hence the bottleneck effect, and manpower placement has to be thought of, i.e. those people who roam between lines and ask about your order, tallying them in teeny pads. Guess what, they’re not significantly improving the time of you being served. They might as well be put into better use as cashiers or crew people. The horizontal distance between cashiers should be extended as people carrying trays with their orders in it waste valuable time in dodging the lines (not to mention those pesky people who snug themselves across lines to pick up straws).

Good evening my dirty little city, it’s been a while.

I love my country. Only here would you be able to find academic marketing at the expense of other institutions.

Kudos for this particular series of billboards (well, they’re not actually billboards, but more of graffiti’s in the form of tarpaulins. Eyesore, really) going to Eastwood, courtesy of Informatics. One of them goes like this:

“Ateneo or La Salle may be your first choice. But abroad, this one counts: Informatics.”

True, very true.

I’ve never really heard of any overseas domestic helpers who heralded from ADMU or DLSU.

Make your countrymen proud, dear graduates of Informatics, we need the remittances.

[link]

-----

I’d like to leave these parting words, in reprisal (since it relates very much to why these promotions were made in the first place) courtesy of yours truly:

“What meaning is there to exist when the poor has no one to look up to and for the rich to look down to? When all dreams are real and when all efforts come in vain?

How can joy exist without sorrow? It's unrealistic and absurd to hope for a perpetually happy world for after a while, it would cease to be happy; it would be awfully boring.

Contrasts and limitations are thus necessary for anything to be considered valuable.”

“The last thing I remembered was cheap whiskey and cheaper perfume. I think her name was Vanessa. I clearly wasn’t paying any attention; I just didn’t want to drink alone.

Vanessa, Van, V. the girl who had an opinion to just about anything you could conceivably throw at her at. Opinions which, at least to her anyway, needed to be heard for her to feel, well, noticed. Vanessa. Verbose.

So there I was, idling in a dull, throbbing semi-consciousness. I knew I was in for a rude awakening. But an apocalyptic hangover wouldn’t be the worst of my problems.

For the past two days, the silent vibrations of my phone were more of a nuisance rather than an anticipation of a sweet nothing. I checked my answering machine today and got about ten messages all from the same sender:

‘[beep]

Hey. I’m calling to tell you that we were expecting you yesterday but you failed to show up. Anyway, we’ve been meaning to ask something from you regarding her case, and I suppose you know that there’s a pending case between the management against her, and we received some documents in which you’re involved. So as your former employer, we would like to protect your interest as well, so we were hoping to hear your side, if possible. So there. Give me a call or message, okay?

[beep]’

I never expected that this whole case would grow so much to become extremely overrated. I never wanted to become legally implicated in this shuffle between her and everything else, but it seemed inevitable. Looks like what she did to me sealed the deal. My deal. My fate.

I guess the price for me to do anything is as much as a shot of whiskey and a blowjob. ‘Protect your interest’, HAH! What bull. These are the things that I loose my sleep over, and I love my sleep.

Now, you can leave me alone with my thoughts and my next shot of drink.”

xxx

How every evening, he would anticipate her panes waking up, her fingers gently tapping the frame, where he would imagine where he was instead, beside her, getting a glimpse of everything from her perspective, opening her room's full bodied window.

He would opt to hide every morning in the shadows of his own room, as a result of being in waking for the whole night, until the morning chirps of the sparrows beckon him to call it a day (or night). His bed, now streaked with the morning rays coming from his grilled windows, with lights from the sky seemed hesitant, of whether to accompany him or not.

The woman through the other window, although he had the chance of knowing her name, he would not dare mention it, would move between the small square panes of her now open windows. Shadow fleeting by, it's a most peculiar feeling.

[…]

As the rain was easing to a slight drizzle that night, the man's hands were damp with cold sweat. His knees could barely hold him as he crawled from the bed to the floor and tried to stand up to take his final peek.

[…]

Between the streaks of the faint raindrops he saw the silhouette of flowers on a vase, placed quaintly, right in the middle of her window frame.

He swears they were tulips.

xxx

Good evening my dirty little city.

The thought of doing a local version of Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, Katie Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Bellici’s series came into my mind again while I was staring blankly at the huge gaping pothole left by the Metro Manila Development Authority beside the Citybank Building sidewalk on Eastwood Libis.

If you might recall, I think I did one such thing some time ago when I tried to test the myth that your streetwise barkers, those clingy raggedy peons who shout public transport destinations (see On Commuting, pt. 2), could fill a bucket with coins from their daily earnings (amounting to about Php 500.00 / day). It was statistically found (through T-test analysis), that one could indeed reach that quota, but also to effortlessly go over it.

That particular experiment could use an update because I came to the realization that a perspective check was in place (see On Commuting, pt. 1). Barkers indeed do not serve their primary purpose of helping you find the jeepneys, FX, or whatnot, because that’s simply a stupid reason. We’re not friggin’ blind.
Barkers persist to thrive in the complicated microeconomy of public transportation because it serves a useful (presumed) purpose of helping to market specific public utility vehicles for random passengers to choose them for others. Now that I’ve thought about it, barkers tend to raise the probability (again all under a presumption) of a specific jeep to be chosen and ridden by random passengers.

Using an experimental model, with the barker as the dependent variable, and during a one-shot week long data collection to get the mean daily earnings of a jeepney driver (taking into consideration the variable that a jeepney driver tips a barker of about 3-10 pesos, whenever a barker attracts a passenger, regardless of him successfully attracting one or many, the variable of mean daily fuel consumption, the variable of mean daily food consumption, and the variable of mean daily bribe money), three questions are being raised:

1. Is there a difference between the mean daily earnings of a jeepney driver when aided by a barker, and one without?
2. In the finding that there is indeed a difference, is the difference enough to say that it is significantly beneficial / significantly detrimental to the jeepney driver?
3. In the finding that there is indeed a difference, what is the difference between the probability of a random passenger choosing a public utility vehicle without the aid of a barker, and one with?

Ahh, the questions in life that could change the world.

Good afternoon my dirty little city. The following two texts are actual press releases from Team Unity’s official website ([link]). Tell me what you can make of this.

Ah, the wonders editing and ghostwriting. A snap of the fingers and a candidate from Ilocandia, who’s an admitted gambler, embezzler, & an all around no-goodnik at that, could suddenly have complete command of the English language, and would even dare to exhibit rhetoric.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present to you, finesse and wit at its finest – mudslinging.

The overall campaign strategy that the administration is boastfully banking is playfully reminiscent of one peculiar highschool batchmate. Yes, him. Him, who could make a ginseng walk; him, who could place, yet alone purchase a nuclear reactor in his back yard; and him, who was able to construct a car with no wheels, no engine, and no fuel, but could run.

“Him”, who will be only referred to as such, was able to make an engine-less, wheel-less car, that could run solely on imagination. Beat that, Peter Pan!

There. If you could see the absurdity and delusion of this poor, poor man, the proceeding article will be a synch.

Read on.

LACKLUSTER PERFORMANCE IS REASON FOR POOR GO RATING
April 28, 2007

The growing sophistication and maturity of the voting public is the reason why Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III is doing poorly in the current campaign and not an imaginary special operation to make him loose, Team Unity senatorial candidate Luis “Chavit” Singson said yesterday.

“Noynoy Aquino should ask himself in a very candid way what he had done inhis long stay in Congress, a question he should also ask Alan Peter Cayetano and Francis Escudero,” Singson said.

Singson added that during their stay at the House of Representatives, Aquino, Escudero and Cayetano did nothing except to grandstand and gain media mileage for a Senate run.

Voters can “see through this track record of zero performance and100 per cent grandstanding “pushing them to withdraw their support for Aquino,” Singson said.

Singson was reacting to a statement made by Aquino, in which he blamed the administration for carrying out a supposed special operation against him and Cayetano.

Singson said that Team Unity is committed to a high-level campaign focused on issues and a growth agenda, “unlike Aquino’swhining and griping and concoction of non-existent plots against his candidacy.”

Singson reminded Aquino that the endorsement of an impeachment resolution “does not a lawmaker make.”

“Aquino should know by now that running for the Senate means preparing an extensive legislative agenda, a longer list of pro-people and pro- growth advocacy, a real commitment and dedication to pursuing national growth. You cannot run for the Senate based on a hate list and impeaching the president,” Singson said.

Singson said that in its fearless forecast, Aquino would even fare poorly in his home province of Tarlac “which he failed to serve with distinction in Congress.”

Earlier, Tarlac Gov. Jose Yap said during a Team Unity sortie that Aquino would not even win in their Tarlac home province.

“Aquino has no political bailiwick, no support base, no real political boost from sectors and no real political network,” Singson said.

“Aquino, if I were him, should work hard and campaign hard instead of griping and whining,” Singson said.

xxx

TEAM UNITY: LEFT-RIGHT PACT ON ‘VOTE-PROTECTION’ SUGGESTS GO’s POSSIBLE LINK TO EXTREMIST GROUPS DESTABILIZING GOV’T
April 28, 2007

A Genuine Opposition plan to forge a pact with communist-leaning partylist groups on the supposed protection of GO votes in the May 14 balloting has seemingly lent credence to earlier military intelligence reports on an “unholy alliance” among the mainstream opposition the Left and right-wing forces to topple the Arroyo government, Team Unity said over the weekend.

Team Unity senatorial candidate Luis “Chavit” Singson recalled that in February last year, the President was forced to declare a state of national emergency owing to the military’s timely discovery of the mainstream opposition’s alleged involvement in a Left-Right conspiracy to overthrow President at the height of festivities marking the anniversary of the 1986 Edsa Revolt.

“Last year’s intelligence reports on a leftist-rightist conspiracy have only been reinforced by the proposal of GO candidate Panfilo Lacson for the opposition to enter into a shadowy alliance with the Left supposedly to protect their votes in next month’s elections,” Singson said.

“Such a working arrangement, as revealed by Lacson, suggests that an unholy alliance has long been forged by the mainstream opposition, then known as the United Opposition (UNO), with ultra-rightist and left-wing groups,” Singson said.

“Even GO’s campaign mnemonic, which is PLAN CO REVOLT, sends a not-too-subliminal message to the public of the real agenda of the opposition,” Singson said.

One of the 11 candidates of GO is ex-Navy Lt./SG Antonio Trillanes, who had figured in the failed Oakwood Mutiny in 2003.
Moreover, Lacson has endorsed the candidacy of independent senatorial bet Gregorio Honasan, his Philippine Military Academy classmate or ‘mistah” who was also implicated in the Oakwood mutiny as well as in the February 2006 coup attempt and other cases of military adventurism, especially during the Aquino presidency.

Singson was reacting to reports that Lacson had proposed this Left-Right alliance to ex-President Estrada to help safeguard the votes of the opposition in the May 14 polls. Bayan Muna representative Teodoro Casino has reportedly confirmed the “vote-protection project, saying that it was one of the “common undertakings” that his group and its allies have established with GO.

This alliance being formed by GO with left- and right-wing forces in the guise of coming up with a “vote-protection” project should not be taken lightly by law-abiding and peace-loving Filipinos considering the events that unfolded in February 2006, Singson said.

Singson warned voters that a repeat of the February 2006 coup attempt could wipe out the economic gains that we have achieved so far and totally derail the “social payback” agenda of the President to deliver to the masa the tangible dividends of growth directly to the people in the form of more jobs and the better delivery of social services such as basic education, primary health care and low-cost housing.

“The Filipino masa will end up the ultimate losers if another coup attempt takes place at a time when the economy is already in full swing,” Singson said. “Ongoing government initiatives to translate the gains of economic growth into social benefits for the people would all go to waste should freedom-loving Filipinos allow this unholy alliance to prosper and succeed in carrying out its destabilization agenda.”

The landslide victory of Team Unity on May 14 would not only assure Filipinos of economic stability in the years to come, but would likewise safeguard the nation from being victims of an emerging Left-Right conspiracy to grab political power, Singson said.

xxx