Day: November 10, 2019

TPM and Zero Losses

~ osasuoviawe

In TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), improvement tools and improvement teams exist to improve our processes and guarantee reliability/predictability/agility.

However, within it, is a bias for results. People biased for results, use that inherent bias in the system, to change improvement tools and improvement teams to result tools and result teams.

This makes some people to set mediocre targets, in order to show “fantastic” results.

Some dismiss significant improvements, because they did not meet bold targets.

Some get the result by any means and bring in the TPM process as an afterthought.

Results matter. But only if it actually improves the process. Where results are independent of process, disaster lurks around the corner.

Which is why I love the zero loss concept, aka, elimination of a defect in the process. It is a target that builds in process optimisation and sustainable result-orientation.

But even that can be hacked, if we do not change the current incentive systems.

– Osasu Oviawe

Human resolve

~ osasuoviawe

2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14
It happened also that seven brothers and their mother were arrested and were being compelled by the king, under torture with whips and cords, to partake of unlawful swine’s flesh.
One of them, acting as their spokesman, said, “What do you intend to ask and learn from us? For we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers.”
And when he was at his last breath, he said, “You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.”
After him, the third was the victim of their sport. When it was demanded, he quickly put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, and said nobly, “I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.”
As a result the king himself and those with him were astonished at the young man’s spirit, for he regarded his sufferings as nothing.
When he too had died, they maltreated and tortured the fourth in the same way.
And when he was near death, he said, “One cannot but choose to die at the hands of men and to cherish the hope that God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!”

Homily:

Read the whole of 2 Maccabees 7.

See, that faith is not hinged on being saved from all earthly discomfort, but on absolute trust in God, independent of circumstance.

When you realise that this evil was brought by a choice not to eat pork, you will realise how far man can go to exert power, and how far man can also go to uphold belief.

The story is on many scales, the most insightful on the power of human resolve.