Posting pictures... finally

I've had a heck of a time posting photographs since I arrived in France. Not sure what the difficulty is, but I may have found a solution -- I downloaded Google's picture organizing application Picassa tonight and it has a feature allowing me to publish photos on a blog. Not sure yet how to put get pictures into my previous posts, but I'll keep working it.

In the mean time, here are some photos of the place where I'm working.

Here's an exterior shot. The building on the right is a fabrication shop; the glass building houses the managers and salespeople; the assembly hall is behind the offices -- you can see a bit of it on the left. It's not a very large facility, by my company's standards, but it's not small either.

Here's my little work area. I sit in room adjacent to my counter-part's office. I share this area with Jerome and Fatima; lots of space for meetings and workshops; the whiteboard is connected to a printer, and Fatima makes coffee for us each morning. Unfortunately, I've got to go to another area to access the internet.

You can see some of our handiwork on the wall. We led the leadership team through a mapping exercise to documement their over-all processes for selling, designing, producing and testing a seat. The pink post its reflect chronic problems which impact their ability to deliver on time.

Here's a business class seat being assembled. They produce eight or nine different models of economy, business and first class seats. Note the video monitors coming up out of the arm-rests. This "in-flight-entertainment" hardware is a real bottle-neck. The airline chooses the vendor and rarely is the stuff available on-time.

The factory is a mess, but it's not as bad as it first appears. There are six different "lines" -- on a few of them, the line really is an "assembly line" but on the others the build process is more of a "cell" with one or two people building a seat from start to finish. If I had my druthers, they'd move all of their operations to a line design -- it makes the delivery of parts to the operators much easier, and simplifies the challenge of documenting and standardizing build processes. Also, it makes it much easier to see how things are going. It's hard to tell if this seat is ahead or behind schedule-- it's a safe bet that it's behind though!

The biggest problem in the factory is not in the factory: the folks who assemble the seats suffer terribly from part shortages. Unfortunately, they choose to begin "the build" before they have the full compliment of hardware -- this means partially complete assemblies stack up all over the place. To my eye, they waste time, effort and space with all this starting and stopping -- better to wait and not start the build unless all the parts are available.

Here, some economy class seats wait for video-monitor screens from a supplier -- without these screens and associated cables, the assemblers cannot mount the upholtsry on the seat-back.

Glad to finally be sharing images. Take a look at the "back issues" -- I'll be working on adding pics there too.

Cheers.