Let me back up a bit. My teaching for Eogogics includes such subjects as systems engineering, process optimization, root cause failure analysis, failure modes and effects analysis, design of experiments, and engineering statistics. A couple of years ago, Eogogics sent me to teach a failure analysis course to a well-known high-tech company based in California (in my own backyard), and the class was such a hit that the client wanted us to go to Guangzhou to teach a series of RCFA classes for nearly 100 engineers in their China-based operations.

I knew this trip would be special, so I took my wife with me this time. We arrived in Guangzhou five days before the start of our training program. We wanted to explore. My work takes me well off the tourist trail, and this adventure promised more excitement than usual. Guangzhou is not part of the typical China vacation package, and I like that. I’m not interested in seeing what tourists see. I want to see what the people who live there see. I want to experience the area as it exists, not as a travel agency thinks I should see it. Our previous visit to China was 10 years ago, and at that time, the country was in an enormous growth spurt. I knew that China’s growth and development had continued, and my wife and I were eager to see the country today.

Images from Guangzhou showing (left) a view from the Canton Tower showing the Pearl River and downtown Guangzhou and (right) a prominent resident of the local zoo.

Our stay in Guangzhou provided a proper window into modern China. Guangzhou is a city of more than 11 million people. It’s orderly and it’s spotless. Imagine a modern city with absolutely no trash, no litter, clean streets, and exceedingly polite people. We didn’t even see gum on the sidewalks. The place is immaculate. Language was not an issue; the Chinese study English starting in elementary school. We took it all in and enjoyed it enormously. We ate in traditional Chinese restaurants (cobra, anyone?), and on days when our tastes were more mundane, we ate at Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, or Papa John’s.

We found significant advances since our last visit to China. On that earlier trip, bicycles dominated the morning and afternoon rush hour; imagine tens of thousands of commuters on bicycles…10 years ago, China was a land of pedal power!. Today, automobiles predominate (there were very few bicycles), yet we saw no traffic jams and the air was clear. Somehow, the Chinese have found a way to keep the traffic moving and the skies clean. One contributor is that all of the taxis and buses in Guangzhou use liquid propane instead of gasoline or diesel fuel. Another is a massive public transportation system. Clean fuels, modern city planning, and a natural predisposition toward courteous behavior are working well here.

Guangzhou is China’s manufacturing hub. The greater Guangzhou region manufactures something on the order of $300 million of goods every day. It’s a phenomenal industrial center. Roughly one-third of all the manufactured goods in China are produced in this region. As a guy who’s spent a good chunk of his adult life in manufacturing, I felt like I was traveling to the Promised Land.

The Chinese took all of this a step further when they established Science City on the outskirts of Guangzhou. It’s all high tech, with buildings, architecture, and technology rivaling anything I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. Imagine starting with a clean slate (a “green field,” as we say in the engineering world) and creating a brand new, high tech industrial village, and you’ll pretty much have Science City. The client put us up in a 5-star hotel right in the center of Science City, and the hotel staff worked very hard to be worthy of each of those five stars. It was awesome. Other than work and sleeping, though, we didn’t spend much time in Science City. For us, it was all about getting out and seeing Guangzhou.

Guangzhou is not a tourist destination, but there’s a lot to see. I researched the city a bit before we left the US to visit China, and the hotel staff helped with maps and recommendations. We hit it all. Guangzhou has two world-class zoos, including one in the center of the city (we spent a day there, and I could have stayed longer). There are several magnificent Buddhist temples and pagodas. There are huge underground and pedestrian shopping malls. The Canton Tower is one of the tallest structures on the planet with an intriguing tram ride around the top (incidentally, the old name for Guangzhou is Canton). There’s a modern subway. There’s the Shamian district, kept intact from the British colonial days. The taxi drivers are great, the public transportation is efficient, and the people are fun. We stood out as US tourists, and because we were obviously enjoying ourselves so much, the folks in Guangzhou welcomed us even more. We found the Chinese people to be genuinely friendly and universally polite. Trust me on this: Guangzhou is a city worth seeing, and we saw it.

More images from Guangzhou showing (right) downtown Guangzhou’s Lotus Pagoda and (left) a Buddha statue inside the Lotus Pagoda.

As I mentioned above, Hong Kong is only two hours down the Pearl River. We took a day, grabbed a train ride, and visited Hong Kong. That was fun, too. Great shopping, great sights, and more great restaurants!

The photos below capture some scenes of Hong Kong’s colorful streets.

One thing we noticed (just as we had on our last trip) was overwhelming construction activity in every direction. Construction cranes dotted the horizon, with most of the construction involving huge apartment buildings. China is undergoing a mass migration, with much of the population leaving the countryside and moving into the cities.

Turning back to the reason I traveled to Guangzhou, let me tell you about the training. Although everyone in class spoke English, the fluency levels varied and my hosts asked me to take this into account. Although I was apprehensive, I found this was a fairly easy thing to do. The comments at the end of the course indicated that the folks in my training sessions appreciated it. I found that the language barrier was no barrier at all.

All of my course participants were degreed engineers (they work in Quality Assurance, Supplier Engineering, Sustaining Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering, Design Engineering, and Software Engineering). These folks’ thirst for the specialized root cause failure analysis techniques was obvious, and the discussions were quite lively.

In addition to fault tree analysis and other sophisticated root cause identification tools, we covered several quantitative analysis techniques. The folks in China really latched on to these. It was rewarding and a bit scary. In some training sessions in the US, participants are less interested in statistics, design of experiments, and other quantitative topics. In the Chinese sessions, though, these topics elicited the greatest interest. The Guangzhou engineers grasped every nuance inherent to Taguchi testing, analysis of variance, operating characteristic curves, and other complex numerical topics that folks in the US often want to put behind them. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Class photos including one of James Chong, a class participant, and his son, Aaron

I like to tell a joke or two occasionally in my training sessions because it tends to keep the interest level high and, well, I like to tell jokes. When I’m training overseas, I’m always a bit hesitant to do that because jokes don’t always translate well. I asked my first group if I could try a joke, and they enthusiastically agreed to listen. When I finished, half the class laughed heartily. The other half was silent for just a few seconds (until someone translated the punch line). Then everyone was laughing. It was grand fun.

I’ll close with one more interesting observation. I’m a photography nut, and I never miss an opportunity on these grand adventures to grab great photos. I send them to my friends and family back in the US, and one morning when I connected my laptop to the overhead projector, folks in the first Guangzhou course saw some of my photos. They were intensely interested, so I made it a practice at the start of each day to show the previous day’s photos. I think my attempts to capture the beauty of my students’ homeland cemented my friendship with these fine engineers.

One of my students even called me at the hotel during my last weekend and volunteered to take me into the Chinese countryside so that I could photograph life outside the city. Rural China is rapidly disappearing, and it was a great opportunity. We spent a wonderful day with my new friend and his young son, and it was the high point of the trip for me.

Photos below capture scenes of rural China, including a market, the interior of a home, and a boy who loved posing for me.

Teaching in exotic locales is a magnificent experience. I’ve made new friends, visited wonderful places, and had enormous fun. PowerPoint, my passport, and a plane ticket…it’s a tough combination to beat!

Editor’s Note: When not riding a motor scooter or snapping photos, Joe Berk teaches our engineering courses including Systems Engineering, Root Cause Analysis, Failure Modes/Effects, Industrial Statistics, Experiment Design, Quality Management, Cost Reduction, and Engineering Economics. Before joining Eogogics, he held senior management positions in quality assurance, operations, and marketing. He started his career with General Dynamics, where he led their F-16 Air Combat Fighter team in applying fault tree analysis to proactively identify potential aircraft accident causes. This led him to pioneer the application of fault trees as a failure analysis tool in the munitions industry, now widely adopted in that field. His subsequent work exposed him to the DoD, electronics, electro-optical, aerospace, automotive, biomedical, marine, ordnance, consumer goods, water treatment, metal fabrication, and other industries. His hands-on work in many engineering fields adds a real-world dimension to his classes that our clients appreciate. He has published nine books on systems management and continuous improvement as well as articles appearing in many well-known trade publications. Detailed bio

Beyond the fashion make-over one can now have just about anything made-over. A quick glance at the channel guide turns up several options: Bed & Bath Make-Over, Veggie Diet Make-Over, Closet/Storage Make-Over and the list goes on. So, we thought, why not a Knowledge Make-Over? It's not a series on Oprah's new channel, at least not yet, but we've come up with some guidelines you can apply in your quest for the latest in make-overs: the Knowledge Make-Over.

Objectives

What is a project without an objective? It is like a cake without a recipe or a trip without a destination. So, this must be accomplished first. Our objective for a Knowledge Make-Over would be more akin to the second variation we have already discussed: taking someone who already has some knowledge and determining what to add, as opposed to taking some dolt with no apparent knowledge whatsoever and filling them with knowledge the way one would fill a burlap sack with taters. With this idea in mind let's take a specific area of knowledge and set some objectives.

Let's consider knowledge that many people already possess to some degree and that they apply most days to their work, or even personal lives: Internet Protocol. Let's further break that down into two sub-categories, IPv4 and IPv6. Our objective, therefore, will be to do a Knowledge Make-Over which will improve and enhance our existing IPv4 knowledge while adding new knowledge of the approaching IPv6 protocol, thereby giving us a practical and useful knowledge “maker over” on IP.

Motivation

In today's budget conscious world we have to consider why we are expending time and/or money and/or energy and in this case we will be expending all three. So, why? This is a personal answer but an answer that will likely fall into one of three basic categories:

1. Keep a job
2. Get a job or get a new job
3. Do a job better

Regardless of your motivation your methodology will be the same, so read on.

Methodology

There are many tools available to you in your knowledge make-over: books, articles, Wikipedia, talks with colleagues, online training, traditional classes, hire a personal coach/trainer and the list goes on and on. Each has its own financial, time and energy price tag and each will allow you to achieve your goal in a different amount of time and to a different depth and understanding. But, you cannot even start to try to apply any of them until you find out what you don't know. And how is that seeming exercise in chasing one's own tail accomplished? One must find an existing inventory of the new knowledge and realistically compare what one already knows to what one does not know. Let's use a specific example. Eogogics offers several IPv6 courses. Let's use the outline for one such course as a knowledge inventory and see what we know and don't know.

The first two sections of the outline are Introduction and TCP/IP Review and TCP/IP Management . We should have a reasonable mastery of these two sections and if we don't we should stop and focus on an IPv4 make-over. The third section, IPv6 Overview is where things start to get interesting: Shortcomings of IPv4 (we suspected that, didn't we?), Extending IPv4 address space and usage (maybe as a way of putting off a move to IPv6 or at least delaying it?), Gradual implementation of IPv6 (sounds safer), Describe IPv6 basic features (yes, yes, yes!), IPv6 supported on Windows (I sure hope so), IPv6 supported on Cisco routers , (well, I've got HP, but I will learn something) and Installing IPv6 on a Windows 2003 Server computer ( this will provide some insights!).

This is very exciting and enthusiasm grows through the next several sections, IPv6 Addressing and Header Structure (I know IPv4 but this is new), ICMPv6 and Management Tools (I know Internet Control Management Protocol, PING and all that, but there's a new one for IPv6?), Neighbor Discovery and Multicast Listener Discovery (lots of new stuff here, some of the essence of IPv6 I suppose), Auto-configuration and Name Resolution (lots of stuff we didn't know plus DNS on steroids), IPv6 Routing (we still have to have that and IPv6 is different?), Co-existence (most likely that dual-stack thing I was wondering about) and Wrap-Up !

Process (Make Over!)

Now we take each of the areas where we have a knowledge deficiency and try to fill the gap. Reading is always good but lacks the hands-on that takes us from being "someone who read about it" to being a "practitioner". Online training is also good and the perfect solution for someone who is constrained on their $$$ budget but has plenty of time to invest. Some of the better training also includes online labs which will get the learner closer to a practitioner stage. Many people will opt for stand-up training, and here is where it gets really $$$ expensive though you can save time and energy.

In choosing the human to lead the stand-up training the knowledge they possess has to be weighed against their ability to convey that knowledge in a meaningful way. An internal expert might be just what you need because they can provide insights and observations that are beyond the reach of even the most prescient of outside experts. On the other hand, an outside expert can bring a fresh new perspective. In a perfect world the inside and outside experts would be combined to co-deliver a Knowledge Make-Over of extreme value to the organization.

Results

No one likes "tests". For kids we continue to call them "tests" and simply force them to do it or, in the more "enlightened" schools, we simply do away with them completely and tell the kids they are all "winners". For adults we call them assessments and there really is no certain way to gauge success without an assessment prior to a Knowledge Make-Over and after (preferably after they have been back on the job for a while since the makeover) so we can see the difference in real, measurable terms. In many learning exercises today we forego this requirement but if we want to assess the real impact of our Knowledge Make-Over some sort of before and after "snap shot" is needed for purposes of comparison.

Conclusion

If you do want to participate in the Make-Over craze at least do a make-over that will help you to keep a job, get a job or get a new job or do a better job. There are many ways to gain knowledge so choose the methodology that gives you the best return on your investment of time, money and energy.

Editor’s Note:

KK Arora (http://www.eogogics.com/bios/KA/ ) is the President of Eogogics Inc, a training/consulting company specializing in high-tech fields such as telecommunications and engineering as well as the critical "soft skills" areas of professional and leadership development. An award winning teacher, he has been teaching/training on all platforms, developing training, managing training companies, and inspiring trainers for 35 years. He's the author of several books and articles. Jim Cavanagh (http://www.eogogics.com/bios/james-cavanagh/ ), a dynamic and entertaining presenter, teaches the Eogogics courses on IP-based and optical networking technologies. He has been designing networks, consulting, teaching, speaking, and writing for 35 years as well. He has published many articles and six books to date, with another book on the way. His training audiences applaud him as much for his technical knowledge as they do for his energy, clarity, and wit. If you are looking for a knowledge-makeover in a high-tech or soft-skills area, you may wish to check out our course outlines, comparing what you know against what's covered in that outline. You will find many free educational resources on our website as well (http://www.eogogics.com ).

• *5G Wireless: Though its implementation is nearly a decade away, 5G wireless nevertheless appears to be on the minds of many of our customers. 5G networks will have – among other things -- “brains” capable of recognizing, interacting, learning, and adapting. With 5G’s high potential to disrupt ‘business as usual’, it’s not surprising that government policy makers and regulators, national labs, and corporate CTO’s alike are getting interested in understanding how this technology, dubbed the “second wave’ of wireless, is different than everything that has come before it.
• *Carrier Ethernet: For over a quarter of a century, customers have wanted the same technology that interconnects their desktops to go out the door, down the street and across town, across the country or around the world. That option is now available and, unsurprisingly, they are buying lots of it. We believe that Ethernet, delivered as a service by carriers, will continue to grow in 2012.
• *Cloud Computing: Whether you call it “outsourcing, the next generation” or “the next big thing”, one thing is for sure: for many organizations Cloud Computing really is the next big thing. But, like the last big thing and the next next big thing, there are a lot of considerations, from implementation models to standards, security, liability and governance. Make the right choices and simplification, lower costs, and great IT value can be yours.
• *Cyber Security and Warfare: A spate of cyber-attacks – some, quite serious -- have recently affected organizations as diverse as the CIA, US Senate, IMF, NATO, Google, Lockheed Martin, Sony, and Citigroup, prompting Leon Panetta, the US Defense Secretary, to warn that “the next Pearl Harbor we confront could very well be a cyber-attack.” Thus while all who queried are interested in “cyber-attack proofing” their organizations, government entities are also interested in the policy, regulatory, and strategy issues posed by the cyber threat.
• Digital Identities and Privacy: Digital identities are not persons or organizations but, rather, the digitally visible representation of a person or organization that enters into a transaction with another person or organization or their digital identity. Increasingly transactions of all kinds – from financial transactions to those involving real goods and services – are being done with digital identities. The leading edge companies are watching this topic closely.
• **Home Area Networks (HANs): Crashing prices and gargantuan leaps forward in capacities and capabilities have driven technologies, once only available to the richest corporations and government agencies, into the home market, and not just for the richest homes. The Home Area Network itself has created an important market niche for personal routers and femtocells, but savvy organizations are concentrating their efforts on applications where the HAN meets the WAN, such as SmartGrid and home management services such as fire, security, and chemical monitoring.
• *Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS): IMS is the blueprint for the evolution of wireless and wireline Internet as one big, transparent service offering. IMS is not new, of course. What is new are some of the recent breakthroughs and market activity in IMS. It continues to remain an important technology to watch in 2012.
• *IPv6 Migration and Implementation: February 2012 marks one year since we exhausted the pool of old IPv4 addresses. It’s not that the IPv4 warehouse is empty (it isn’t), but no more can be manufactured because there are no more raw materials. This situation puts pressure on organizations to do something with IPv6. And, they know, doing the right thing the right way at the right time can be crucial to an organizations’ survival. Think about running out of telephone numbers; this is on the same scale!
• *LTE (long Term Evolution): The Fourth Generation (4G) of cellular communications based on the LTE standard, one of the two major 4G wireless technologies, edged out WiMAX in 2009 and has since stayed high on the queries list, a standing it is expected to continue to maintain as the LTE deployments continue to unfold and as the technology evolves to LTE Advanced and beyond in the decade ahead.
• **Mobile Backhaul: Every new YouTube™ posting, every sports team that makes their games available on hand helds, and everyone who plays Angry Birds on a mobile places additional burdens on the already beleaguered wireless infrastructure. But wait, there’s more! What about getting that info from the wireless tower itself to the Internet? That is what mobile backhaul is all about and mobile backhaul represents a multi-billion dollar solution for which there are many terrestrial and wireless options.
• *Presence, Preference and Geo-Location: Remarkable advances in miniaturization and low power consumption have taken technologies that only yesterday were used for big things like trucks and trains and sent them to the personal and sub-personal realms. Where are you relative to other people, places, and things? What is your desired interaction with those people, places, and things? And what is their desired interaction with you? The answers to these important questions enable a remarkable set of applications from sales and marketing to law enforcement. Combine presence, preference, and geo-location with digital identities and privacy issues for a particularly robust set of technologies poised to really impact the way we live and work.
• **Radio Frequency Identification (RFID): Initially exploited to track returning Royal Air Force planes in WWII Britain, RFID has gone small as well as gone broad and is now appearing in everything from cereal boxes to tomatoes to light bulbs to passports … airports, drug enforcement agents, race horses, and purebred cats. Coupled with the explosion in wireless backhaul and Home Area Networks, the future for RFID in its many forms is very bright.
• *Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA): Applying techniques such as fault-tree analysis to trouble shoot components/systems is not new, but what’s currently piquing interest in RCFA is that it’s not just a way to get to the bottom of things after a mishap has occurred but also a powerful tool for actually preventing shutdowns and disasters, thus lowering cost, reducing risk/liability, raising quality, and increasing customer satisfaction/loyalty. Over the years, we have seen interest in RCFA widen beyond our traditional Defense/ Nuclear Energy clientele to include oil/gas pipelines, power stations, IT equipment makers, automotive/locomotive, water treatment plants, paper mills, and others.
• *SIP/SIP-T: Session Initiation Protocol and Session Initiation Protocol Trunking, allied technologies, are so well known that they are simply called by their acronyms: SIP and SIP-T. But familiarity does not tell the entire story. Originally used in Voice over IP for new cheap phone calls to replace expensive old phone calls, SIP continues to flourish for all types of multimedia and rich media communications from voice to video, telematics, command and control, and other session types.
• **SmartGrid: Only one utility reaches more premises than the telephone: electrical power. Power is critical to the continuation of life as we know it. Some experts say that the SmartGrid initiative is about securing America’s electrical livelihood from terrorists and criminals, Some would say that SmartGrid is about modernizing America’s power infrastructure, an infrastructure old timer who has not had a facelift since the 1950s. Other experts would emphasize that SmartGrid is about power conservation and lower power consumption. As is often the case, they are all right. SmartGrid on a continental, national, local, and household level will continue to build momentum in 2012.
• **Social Business: There is a reason why Facebook and similar services are being granted Google-like valuations. It’s because it is all about people. Technology is only important – and valuable – when people buy it and, very often, when people actually use it. Social business is the intersection of people and technology with a business nuance. Success will have been achieved when social and business relationships, enabled by technology in ways never before imagined, are finally monetized.
• **Telematics and GPS: Telematics and GPS are just as important to the military and law enforcement as they are to the Davidson Family out for a Sunday drive in the country and trying to locate the best produce stand. Telematics are integrated into the SmartGrid and into your new car. Together these technologies are geo-enabling drone aircraft and snap-on rear-view mirrors. These and allied technologies are also ones to watch during 2012 and beyond.
• **TelePresence: Meeting with your life size, hi-def human counterparts - from across the street or across the ocean – in a way that facilitates more realistic interaction, and reaction, is the way of the future … today. Experts thought that “video conferencing” would lessen travel and facilitate work-at-home in a way never before possible. Maybe it did, but no one at the time could have envisioned TelePresence, and now we are seeing TelePresence meet wireless. See also: HAN.
• *Unified Communications: Just like IMS and Cloud Computing, Unified Communications has not met expectations. Adoption has been slow by any standard but not due to a shortage of need or a clear business case. Global economic priorities of many organizations have caused slow, cautious adoption of UC but adoption will continue to grow throughout 2012. The coming year will also bring some “aha” moments for organizations who have recently adopted UC and have come to realize the positive benefits of what they have done.
• Voice-Enabled Technologies: Voice-enabled, and voice-enabling, technologies have been around for a very long time but have never been so inexpensive, accurate or easy to integrate into existing products. Voice-enabled applications are virtually endless and, when delivered via one of the Cloud delivery models or as a part of hardware devices, this technology segment will take off. The year 2012 is likely to be a banner one for anything voice enabled, because almost everything can be voice-enabled and most things should be.
  

Another important issue is the sheer size and complexity of cloud computing relative to its apparent simplicity. Stated more directly, cloud computing appears simple but is very complex. The apparent simplicity has caused many organizations to move to cloud computing somewhat blindly, driven largely by promises of simplification which will result in cost savings, or just sheer cost savings. Cost savings alone is often enough cause for celebration. And, interestingly, the results achieved by those organizations who “just go for it” are, unexpectedly, usually very positive. They may experience a rough spot or two but rough spots can be expected during any migration to, or adoption of, a new technology. And how is this possible? Any dim-witted manager who makes a mad dash toward cloud computing with a gold rush mentality, dragging their entire organization with them, should be banished, or worse, but this isn’t usually the outcome. Those dim wits have been saved in just the same way as many who rushed blindly toward IP networks have lived to tell the tale, and for the same reason. They have a “go to person”. That go to person may be staff, consultant, vendor or service provider but that go to person did all of the reading, learning, thinking, testing and planning, much of it on their own time. Or, the go to person is bruised, banged and battered because they were the cushion when the cloud computing project was on the rocks. But, that go to person kept a Wizard of Oz-like control - don’t mind that man or woman behind the curtain – and everything turned out just fine. Like most efforts as important as an organizational evolution in the way information is collected, accessed and managed, there is no middle ground: success is either won through great planning and execution or by slight of hand and tricks with mirrors. Either way it’s considered a success.

Where did this “cloud” thing come from, anyway?

One reason for the complexity/simplicity duality is the cloud model itself. The original intention of the cloud model, from its first use, was to hide the complex reality of what goes on inside a network. The cloud model came about more or less by accident in 1974 or 1975. IBM Account Managers back then were really highly technical engineers who had memorized some people skills. One particular IBM Account Manager had just returned from weeks of training on the new Systems Networking Architecture. He wanted to share his new knowledge with his customer and had enthusiastically filled a chalk board in the customer’s office with diagrams of IBM System 360 and System 370 mainframe computers in different locations connected via 9.6Kbps and 19.2Kbps leased lines and Front End Processors to other S/3xx computers and 327x terminal clusters. He had thrown in TSO, VTAM, CISC, LUs, PUs, SDLC and even X.25 for good measure. He then saw the look of total confusion on his customer’s face. That IBM Account Manager realized he had committed the ultimate IBM Account Manager mistake: he had created a barrier to the sale. His customer might just have to understand everything on the board before the customer would sign the contract: that could take months! Just then his people skills kicked-in. The IBM Account Manager took an eraser and erased all of the complex networking stuff sitting between the customer’s computers. The white chalk residue against the black slate of the chalk board looked remarkably like a cloud, all pretty and fluffy and white, only hinting at the darkness and complexity inside. The cloud model was thus born. It was then, as it is now, a way of saying “let the experts worry about it”.

When the World Was Young

One of the authors well remembers a class in high school when the teacher talked about “when the world was young”. The teacher talked about how interesting it would have been to be a part of the western push of the early European settlers as they went through what is now North Carolina, claiming their homesteads and naming rivers, mountains and valleys in the virgin territory. Later, in Study Hall, a classmate who was part Cherokee talked about how “full of it” the teacher was. The Cherokee had inhabited the same ground for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans and had already named everything quite well, “thank you very much!” He went on to point out that living there for generations before the Europeans ever arrived gave the Cherokee (properly Tsa-la-gi) people a knowledge and closeness to the land that would take thousands of years to cultivate from zero, if the Europeans even cared to. There is a similar issue in cloud computing. Those of us who have been in computing and networking from the beginning recognize the old things with new names. Are not many of the “innovations” of cloud computing similar to time sharing or integration or even outsourcing or the web? They are, and the parallel capabilities are accompanied by many of the same, unsolved, issues such as management, governance, security, billing and the rest of the list. In cloud computing, as in the European history in North Carolina, don’t be confused by the apparent newness of something or lack of experience. And, don’t hesitate to call on the natives for help when needed.

Ad hoc, ad loc and sid pro quo …

The Beatles' Nowhere Man said, “ad hoc, ad loc and sid pro quo. So little time, so much to know!” Consider that at the time the Nowhere Man was created in 1965, there was barely a meg of memory on the planet and that experts were postulating the home computer revolution would include home computers that take up an entire room. Cloud computing has brought with it an immense growth in the amount that there is to know, making cloud computing thousands of times more complex than anything with which the Nowhere Man had to deal. How does one come to understand enough to successfully deal with the immense body of knowledge, let alone its explosive growth? There is a Rosetta Stone, of sorts, provided by the CloudStandards Wiki. Among other things the CloudStandards Wiki provides a centralized point for accessing information related to 13 different de jure or ad hoc standards bodies or standards influencers and their work. None of those standards, however, relate to lower layer cloud computing standards being shepherded through the standardization process by organizations such as IEEE, ITU or even ANSI, who are not listed on the CloudStandards Wiki but must be considered to get the full picture.

In addition to all of the reading, formal education must be a part of the learning process to help you bring logic and structure to what you have learned and to put it to best use … the first time.

Conclusion

Are we optimistic about cloud computing? Yes, we are. But we are also cautious and a bit skeptical, like many networking and IT professionals. We have seen a lot of this before. We have been the planners with good execution and we have also been the cushion that has kept the ship from crashing on the rocks. In many ways cloud computing is a bright new world but in many ways it is business as usual. The key element is to figure out which parts are which, to properly apply hard-won knowledge, combined with new insights and skills, to push networking to new heights of usability, new levels of ease of use and new low levels of cost that humankind has never before experienced. Cloud computing really does have the potential to deliver on all of these promises.

Editorial Note:

Jim Cavanagh, who heads up the Eogogics Inc networking team, is the developer of the Eogogics Cloud Computing curriculum. Having lived through the Service Bureau era in the ‘70s and outsourcing’s heyday in the ‘80s and ‘90s, he is duly skeptical of Cloud Computing, reluctant to just mix up batches of “Cloud Computing Kool Aid” and pass it around. He approaches this topic not only from the holistic business-and-technical perspective but also as a realist, with plenty of real life knowledge about what makes a great Cloud Computing application as well as the Cloud Computing pitfalls organizations should avoid. Jim has 35+ year experience in IT and telecom that encompasses network strategy, planning, design, implementation, applications, security, trouble-shooting, and marketing.  He’s also a dynamic presenter and the author of seven books on IT and telecom including Cloud Computing: Success Stories and Cautionary Tales, due out in 2012. (More about Jim) … The article’s co-author, KK Arora, is the Founder and President of Eogogics Inc. and the inspiration for the Eogogics Cloud Computing curriculum. His career also spans 35+years in IT, telecom, and IT/telecom education. (More about KK)

Today, nearly every new phone that ships contains a GPS chip.  Furthermore, the penetration of so called smart phones is very high and most everyone that has one also has a data plan.  This enables many new location-based applications that are very flat in their operational structure.  They rely on use of the so called User Plane that operates in a client-server framework using only the client software, GPS chip, communication (over Internet Protocol), and server interactions.  This very flat, carrier dis-intermediating model is in contrast with what was thought about a decade below would be one in which the carriers would maintain control of access and management via their Control Plane architectures.

While the mobile operators continue to use the Control Plane investment made initially for supporting 9-1-1 only, some also leverage it to offer mobile positioning, via so called Location as a Service (LaaS) location aggregators that broker location.  However, the User Plane is a competing approach that does not require carrier involvement or the involvement of a third-party location broker.  A good example would be Google Navigation.

The first two stages in the evolution of commercial location services have been location enhanced applications (such as local information like closest pizza) and location-based applications (such as navigation) in which location is intrinsic to the application.  In former, location arguably makes the application better (but it could stand by itself) and the latter represents applications that only make sense with location.

The current stage of evolution is manifest in the expansion of ways in which location information can be obtained as well as an explosion of location enhanced and location-based services.  This is due in part to the advent of the location brokering model.  A broker is a party that arranges transactions between a buyer and a seller, and gets a commission when the deal is executed.  Location brokering can be defined purchasing location data from one party (the carriers most prevalently) and selling to others (content and application providers).  An example of a location broker is Loc-Aid, who buys location from the carriers and sells it to various customers.

The future of location will be location becoming an assumed part of not only all applications but also even the mobile network operators’ business operations (such as customer care) and support for various compliance issues (such as law enforcement, public safety and homeland security). Mobile network operators will come to the realization that presence and location are the best value-added service enabler that they can leverage to increase customer and business value.

The future of location will also involve convergence with a few other areas including identity and privacy management, presence, augmented reality, social networks, and user generated content.

To realize this future, the current business models and approach will evolve from one of the current combination of silo, monolithic User Plane and simple location broker approaches to an ecosystem that provides pervasive location mediation and ultimately federation of location, GIS data, location data, and application data.

Whereas the current location brokering ecosystem facilitates brokering of only location data (Lat/Long), a mediation ecosystem will facilitate transactions that involve more than just location itself.

The mediation function in telecom terms pertains to a function that routes or acts on information passing between network elements and network operations. Location mediation is a function of managing location data that passes between network elements and network operations.  Location data includes everything from geo-coded data to attribute data associated with location-enhanced and location-based services.  The location mediator ensures that each party in the ecosystem exchanges data with each other, as pre-determined based on teaming agreements, as well as ensuring the AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting) function.

Beyond mediation lies a future of location federation.  Federation can be viewed as a meta-version of mediation in which there is a root-level mediator that ties together all of the other mediators within a federation.  This enables the exchange of location data, at the appropriate level, even between competing parties.  Whereas Google would never share certain data with Yahoo! directly, they could trust a mediator (or mediator of mediators at the root level) to manage the exchange for them.

A federated model will have many advantages including the ability to support syndication of service provider, content/application provider, enterprise and consumer user generated content.  Exchange of location data, including mapping geo-coded content, will be at its extreme as it can be exchanged across virtually any party, so long as pre-determined business rules at met.  It is the role of the mediator to ensure that business rules, such as access, privacy, and service level agreements, are met.  It is also the role of the mediator to ensure that proper billing and settlement occurs.  Another important role of the mediator in a federated location model is to ensure proper verification occurs including authenticity of content, verification of business/personal identity, presence and location of user.

The evolution to a federated location mediation model will not happen overnight.  There will be some fits and starts and experimentation with different approaches.  Ultimately this model will be enabled by introduction of certain key technologies and solutions.  It will also be dependent on a more mature location services environment and a realization on the part of the mobile network operators that bearer services will ultimately become pure commodities.

Editor’s Note:

The author’s exposure to a wide range of technologies and applications over a 23+ year career has equipped him with some specialized experience in the areas of intelligent networks/applications (e.g., mobile messaging and marketing, prepaid wireless), NextGen networks (e.g., IMS, SDP, and NGN OSS/BSS systems), and mobile location services/technology. An Eogogics Principal Instructor, he teaches our courses on NextGen and Location Based Services. Eogogics offers several courses on mobile positioning technologies and location based services: Positioning and Location Workshop, Advanced Workshop on Positioning and Location, 4G LTE & UMTS/HSPA Location Based Services to Support E911 Requirements, IP, Location and Geo-Location Technologies for Law Enforcement, Intelligence, and Public Safety. We also offer a host of research publications on these topics. Our courses and research reports cover both the technical and business issues of mobile location technologies/services.

The purpose of a cyber-attack may be to embarrass or incapacitate an organization and/or to steal its intellectual property or customer identification and financial data. Companies on the receiving end of cyber-attacks have suffered monetary losses in the billions, damage to their brand, and loss of customer confidence. When the attack is on a government agency or a company that works with the government, what is stolen or damaged can have lasting consequences for our national defense and security.  “It’s not a brave new world; it’s a bad new world,” in the words of Howard Stringer, the Sony CEO.  “It’s the beginning, unfortunately—or the shape of things to come,” he added.

Against this backdrop, Eogogics is introducing its Cyber Security and Cyber Warfare curriculum with a couple of new courses.  Cyber Security and Cyber Warfare (CYBERSEC, 2 days) addresses the key issues of cyber security and cyber warfare.  It begins with an introduction to information, network, and computer security. It then delves into how these technologies can be influenced and attacked at a national, strategic level as part of a cyber-warfare campaign.

Cyber Space and Cyber Conflict Policy (CYBERPOL, 2 days) offers an overview of cyber space and cyber governance, covering both national and international policies and regulations that shape how the Internet is used and involved in cyber conflict.

These courses will, of course, be of interest to government agencies such as Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, National Labs, and the Intelligence Community as well as to the companies who interface with or develop/operate information/communications systems for the government. They will also interest any private sector company that has the visibility and/or the information that makes it the potential target of a hack or attack.

Both courses are taught by instructors currently involved in pushing the state-of-the-art of cyber security/warfare, both on the technology and policy/regulation sides, and are continually updated to include the latest research and practice.  All classes are tailored to the participants’ industry and “tech-level”.

If you would like to find out more about our cyber security/warfare curricula, just call 1 (888) 364-6442 (or +1 703 281 3525 internationally) or email sales@eogogics.com.

Weeks before World IPv6 Day Eogogics was contacted by Dewayne King, the Vice President of Operations for ICTX WaveMedia in Houston, Texas to conduct a four day IPv4 to IPv6 Migration Workshop. In many ways, Dewayne is the perfect Vice President of Operations. He is respected and trusted by his management, but at the same time he is every bit a network engineer and tech, with rough good looks, the sun-ravaged skin of a man who spends a lot of his time outdoors and a confidence that can only come from having built the network pretty much from the ground up. While Dewayne refuses to accept the credit for developing a master plan and building his network to its exact specifications, at the very least he cannot refute the idea that the right decisions were made at each point along the way while building a network which many of his envious competitors may never be able to achieve. The results are that ICTX WaveMedia has a network which is as simple and easy to maintain as possible and accommodates all types and flavors of customer traffic while giving the customers the capacity they need at a competitive price.

Over the course of several weeks, Eogogics developed a custom workshop to meet ICTX WaveMedia’s training objectives. Dewayne had several objectives for the training, all of which are related to the requirement to keep his staff as prepared as possible to meet customer needs. Specific training objectives were:

Make Dewayne’s people capable of looking at the ICTX network from an IPv6 perspective

Be certain ICTX is ready to assist their customers across the IPv4 to IPv6 bridge

Have internal familiarity with IPv6

Establish a common and accurate vocabulary for use internally and with customers

Write a draft plan for migration of their ISP backbone to IPv6

Meet the Attendees

The workshop was attended by six ICTX WaveMedia personnel of which three are network engineers, two are NOC technicians, and one is network engineering manager. Everyone is very skilled in their particular areas and each brought something special to the workshop. This is very important because a workshop is not a “class”, per se, or a video that is played to eager viewers. Rather, a workshop is a collaborative environment that is facilitated by the person standing up and that person is not always the “instructor”, in the traditional sense. All of the attendees made excellent and timely contributions and I think that each, in their own ways, benefitted a great deal from the workshop if their comments during the daily end-of-day debriefs were any indication.

Building on IPv4 and Big Bandwidth vs Managed Bandwidth

ICTX WaveMedia has massive fiber capacity which gives them a clear competitive advantage and allows them to easily accommodate growth of existing customers and addition of new customers. With a network running around 4% full ICTX WaveMedia can ignore the complexities of traffic management and Quality of Service and the costs and performance issues that go with them. Starting with this architecture as a base, the first day of the workshop traversed the 7-Layer OSI Model from bottom to top and established a sound, common understanding of IPV4 and the architectural components and services that ICTX customers are using today. The WireShark protocol analyzer was introduced as a tool for use in the class as well as a skill that could be applied to installation and troubleshooting scenarios after class. Drills were done where each workshop participant lead the group through the intricacies of all seven layers of packets captured dynamically during class. This is the scariest thing for anyone who is just an instructor – as opposed to a practitioner – because anything can show up on the screen and a run-of-the-mill instructor will be left without a script. Not everything in our dynamic WireShark captures was vanilla, either, and we worked through all of the fields of several dynamic traces together to develop an understanding of exactly what we were seeing. And, on World IPv6 Day itself we were not disappointed: there was an increase in IPv6 traffic, both tunneled and native mode that we were able to view as well, but, I am getting ahead of myself.

It wouldn’t be fair to leave the reader with the impression that we taught a bunch of novices IPv4 from “zero to hero” on Day 1 of the workshop. What we actually did was to fill in gaps in knowledge, establish a common vocabulary on everything from bytes to octets to the way that they are numbered to a common understanding of PING and TRACEROUTE and similar functions. With Day 1 behind us, and a solid common understanding of IPv4 as a foundation we moved on to IPv6 issues and migration strategies, which is where we concentrated our efforts for Day 2 and Day 3. We discussed various functions, such as DNS, DHCP and ICMP which exist in IPv4 and still exist in IPv6 as well as NAT and broadcast addresses which no longer exist in IPv6.

One aspect of the class which was not a prominent element of the original workshop plan was security. We discussed security at each step and made it a dimension of every aspect of the architecture, design and planning process.

Customization On Top of Customization

During the daily debrief at the end of Day 3 - preparing to go into the last day of the workshop - attendees were polled and they identified three areas where they felt they needed more information. They wanted more depth on IPv6 addressing with more real life examples and more guidance about how they would deal with IPv6 addresses, they wanted to better understand the Regional Internet Registries and their relationship to them and the hierarchy of address assignments, and they wanted to fully understand how IPv4 addresses are embedded into IPv6 address and converted into hexadecimal. Additional content was prepared on these topics overnight, distributed to workshop attendees and the morning of Day 4 was spent going over the additional supplementary materials, asking and answering questions and rounding out the attendees understanding of IPv6 and the workshop leader’s understanding of the needs of ICTX WaveMedia prior to the final stage of the workshop: developing a customized migration plan for ICTX WaveMedia and their customers.

The Plan

While the specifics of the ICTX WaveMedia migration plan are proprietary and confidential, there are several elements of the plan which can be disclosed in abstract and can provide guidance to persons wishing to know more about the process.

1. Because the ICTX WaveMedia network is a simple, flat, high capacity network, much of the work that ICTX will be doing is assisting their customers across the IPv4 to IPv6 bridge. There are several activities planned – from customer workshops and training to pre-migration testing – to assist ICTX WaveMedia and their customers to become educated and experienced and make a seamless transition.
2. ICTX WaveMedia is doing the calculations prescribed within the IETF RFCs to determine how many IPv6 addresses they will be able to acquire and are taking steps to acquire the addresses before they are needed.
3. ICTX WaveMedia will complete several network optimization and upgrade steps well before the time of migration to IPv6 to assure that they have a stable network before any migration step is begun.
4. ICTX WaveMedia will establish an IPv6 test bed and exercise all aspects of migration and operation prior to migration.
5. ICTX WaveMedia understands the value of the IPv4 addresses that will be freed up during the migration and will manage an IPv4 address pool to allow growth of the IPv4 network customers to keep them from being forced into a migration before they are ready.
6. ICTX WaveMedia will provide their customers with several migration and transition mechanisms from which to choose but will provide guidance to their customers as to which are the most viable for their customers based upon the customers’ specific requirements.
   
   

Conclusion

Like another memorable day - Y2K - the transition to IPv6 will be orderly and without carnage and chaos, at least at ICTX WaveMedia, because of meticulous planning, staging, testing, education and execution of the plan when the time comes. Unlike Y2K there is no “drop dead” date, no clock striking midnight, but Dewayne King and ICTX WaveMedia management heard the news that the final available blocks of IPv4 addresses had been given out in February and were smart enough to plan rather than panic, to develop a clear way ahead before their customers forced them to and to become leaders rather than victims in the IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Whatever you were doing on World IPv6 Day I hope it was as memorable – and productive – as how I spent my time on that day.

Editor’s Note:

Jim Cavanagh, who heads up our networking team, is leading the Eogogics effort to help our clients – old and new – to make smooth, logical and painless transitions to IPV6, something that is easily and seamlessly accomplished with proper planning and attention to detail. He is the developer of our action-learning workshops (workshop 1, workshop 2, full IP curriculum) that combine IP training with a day of hands-on IPv6 migration planning specific to the client’s own network. A dynamic and entertaining speaker, he has been involved in the application, architecture, implementation, security, and trouble-shooting of IP networks for 35 years. His IP involvement has covered every conceivable application including corporate, government, public safety/security, and law enforcement. He has been involved in global corporate and US government IPv6 planning and implementation initiatives since the late 1990’s with organizations that include leading Internet and Backbone Service Providers (BSPs/ISPs) and the DoJ, DoD and DHS since. He is a pioneer in VoIP and was the first to use the term “intranet” in his 1995 book, Internet and Internetworking Security, one of the six books (and scores of technical articles) he has published to date.

Early History of Packet Switching

In the early days, of course, packet switching was over slow lines—often just dial-up speed, 300 bits/second—and available network hardware was also slow.  Thus it was suitable only for low data rate applications such as text email.  This was the case in the 1970s.  In the 1980s speeds began to increase, and new technology allowed higher speed communications over traditional phone lines, for access at least.  Dedicated lines became common for the network backbone, the first of which was the ARPANet, an experimental network project funded by the Department of Defense to see if and how well computers could communicate.  The theoretical maximum data rate over phone lines is 56-64K bits/second, though in practice this is rarely realized.  But speeds gradually crept up and better coding technology allowed modems to reach speeds in the 50K bits/second range.  This was, however, quite marginal for any type of graphical or video application.  Meanwhile networking hardware was increasing in speed, and new fiber optic links were becoming more widely available.  The development of optical amplifiers in the late 1980s enabled dense wave division multiplexing (sending of information simultaneously over many wavelengths of light on a single fiber), which caused bandwidth to explode, and by the late 1990s routers that could switch at 10 Gbits/second were available.

By the mid-1980s it was realized that the “old” method of sending packets through a network, which involved searching a large table at each hop to find the next hop (routing), was very inefficient for the core, where large numbers of packets all followed the same path but each required a separate router table search.  So new technologies were developed, the first of which was Frame Relay (FR), in the early 1990s.  These technologies used the idea of “tag” or “label” switching, whereby packets were assigned a special label when they entered the network, and were “switched” at each hop based on an indexed lookup of that label at each hop, which only had to be done once for a given path.  Thus if large numbers of packets followed a particular path, all would have the same label attached, and significant efficiencies were thereby realized since indexed lookup in a small table was much faster than searching a large table.  This therefore meant the introduction of special paths through the network, corresponding to the labels—in effect a return, in a sense, to a type of connection-orientation.  Increasing packet network speeds and decreasing hardware costs made the choice to use a single network for all types of communication (voice, video, and data) an obvious one, albeit more difficult in practice than in theory, because of the differing requirements for these services.  Voice (or audio) was relatively low bandwidth, but its packets had to arrive in order and within a limited time; otherwise the voice on the other end would become unintelligible.  Even relatively short delays of a few hundred milliseconds are very disconcerting.  Video has similar requirements, though most video can stand larger delays provided that its packets arrive in the correct order.  This allows for buffering to handle some network problems.  Data packets generally have the fewest constraints and can continue as “best effort”.

ATM: Technology to Integrate Disparate Types of Traffic

FR was not designed to integrate multiple types of traffic smoothly and efficiently, so a new technology was developed to facilitate this type of integration, called Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).  ATM was designed from the ground up to handle these three types of traffic over a single network.  Based on hardware capabilities at the time (early 90s), it was decided that packets (called “cells”) had to be made small so that they could be switched in hardware available at the time, to facilitate voice traffic.  A compromise was reached: 48 bytes of data and 5 bytes of header, for a total of 53 bytes.  ATM networks also were designed to operate at layer 2, which means that they operate on a single network where the address of each machine is known.  Communication is over virtual circuits (VCs), which are set up in advance so that a cell with its assigned label could be quickly switched through the network.  The virtual circuits implemented were Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs), intended to be used between destinations that communicated regularly with high volumes of traffic.  Circuits that could be quickly set up and torn down, called Switched Virtual Circuits (SVCs) were part of the specification, but were never deployed.  ATM did allow for expedited flows of time-critical data, so that ATM networks could successfully carry voice, video and data, something that ordinary IP networks could not do well unless their utilization was very low.

ATM networks were very successful and widely deployed during the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, though ATM hardware was complex and rather expensive.  However, ATM was slowly being overtaken by events, events catalyzed by the success of ATM in delivering fast packet performance.  First, commercialization of the old ARPANet, now called the Internet, meant that there was growing interest in web pages, i.e., lots of data, and thus voice traffic—if sent at all—was a smaller and smaller portion of the overall network traffic.  Even email now could carry long text, audio, or video attachments.  The result was that the small packet size was becoming an obstacle (tens of thousands of packets could be required for graphics, even more for video), and the high cost of the hardware made network upgrades very expensive.  Setting up the PVCs was complex and as a layer 2 technology, one ATM network did not natively know about other ATM networks.  In addition, the interface between ATM networks and IP networks was rather clumsy.  At the same time, the cost of IP-based hardware, such as routers, was falling sharply and its capacity was growing.  Moreover IP was becoming the technology of choice for more and more applications, and it integrated well with Ethernet (a layer 2 technology).

Rise of MPLS

This led to the idea of doing with IP (a layer 3 technology) some of the same things as ATM, and specifically, the idea of using label switching to get some of ATM’s benefits.  The technology developed to do this was called Multiprotocol Label Switching, or MPLS.  MPLS has proved to be very capable and flexible, and able to do natively many of the things that ATM was designed to do.  Specifically, MPLS has its own version of ATM PVCs, called “Label Switched Paths” (LSPs) which are easier to set up than PVCs and run over layer 3, so they know about other networks.  These LSPs can be used to reserve bandwidth across a network, which makes possible service-level guarantees—essential for traffic such as voice or video.  The LSPs also enable Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which allow for secure private networks for an organization to be set up over public networks, such as the Internet, at far lower cost than would be required for dedicated links.  These VPNs can be rapidly modified to accommodate new users—something that is very slow and expensive for most networks comprised of dedicated physical links.  In fact MPLS VPNs can operate in two modes: Overlay or Peer.  In the overlay model, the service provider supplies only dedicated links (LSPs) between locations specified by the customer.  In the peer model, the customer’s routers connect with the nearest service provider router, and the service provider takes care of managing the VPN.  MPLS can also provide new types of service, such as Virtual Private Wire Service, or pseudowires, which emulate dedicated layer 2 links, again at far lower cost than actual dedicated links.  Such pseudowires can be setup for carrying Time Division Multiplexed (TDM) data streams, either synchronously (Circuit Emulation Service over Packet Network—CESoP) or asynchronously (Structure Agnostic TDM over Packet Network—SAToP).  By using digitization, pseudowires can actually emulate layer 1 (hard wired) connectivity between sites, i.e., look like an analog connection.

There’s good news here, folks: You don’t have to let this continue. This article describes how Composite Structures used root cause failure analysis to identify and eliminate recurring Apache main rotor blade failures, failures the company previously thought were inherent to its high tech blades and unavoidable.

Composite Structures Division in Monrovia, California, is a build-to-print manufacturer (that means they build products to their customers’ designs). The product we’re discussing here is the Apache helicopter main rotor blade, a product that had been in production approximately 10 years at the time the events in this article occurred.

Rotor Blade Vulnerability and Survivability

The Vietnam War marked the U.S. Army’s first wide-scale use of helicopters, but the Army’s iconic Huey suffered from a serious weakness: its vulnerability to small arms fire. The Army learned the hard way that if a single rifle bullet struck a Huey rotor blade, the blade would disintegrate, resulting in loss of the helicopter and its crew.

The AH-64 Apache. This modern combat helicopter’s main rotor blades can withstand direct hits from both small arms fire and anti-aircraft high explosive projectiles.

After Vietnam, the Army wanted a tougher helicopter, and it turned to McDonnell Douglas for the Apache. One of the primary requirements was greatly-improved main rotor blade survivability.

To meet this requirement, the Army and McDonnell Douglas designed a much tougher rotor blade for the Apache. The new blade has redundant load paths with four adhesively-bonded steel spars. The idea is that if the blade is hit by anything up to a 23mm high explosive round, the four spars keep the blade together, and the helicopter can continue to fly. The concept works; during the Gulf War, an Apache blade took a direct hit by an Iraqi 23mm warhead and made it home.

The Failures

Composite Structures manufactured Apache main rotor blades to a McDonnell Douglas design using a typical layup and bonding process. This involved assembling metal components and applying adhesive under clean room conditions, and then baking the assemblies to cure the adhesive.

Although the company had decades of experience manufacturing other composite structures for a variety of aerospace assemblies, the Apache rotor blades were problematic from the outset of the program. The blades experienced adhesive failures. This occurred shortly after the baking process. It also occurred in service (after blades were on the helicopters).    Half the blades failed before they left the Composite Structures plant. Once in service, the failures cut the blades’ service life to about 800 hours (they were supposed to last 2000 hours).  Amazingly, both the Army and Composite Structures endured this problem during the first decade of the Apache’s life. McDonnell Douglas and Composite Structures took the position that the rotor blades were state-of-the-art, custom-engineered components, and a 50% yield was all that could be expected.

After the program had been in place for about a decade, new management took over the Composite Structures operation. The new management team’s charter was to improve profitability, and the 50% rotor blade rejection rate naturally attracted attention. Composite Structures’ new leaders wanted to eliminate the rotor blade failures, but the reaction to this initiative was frustrating:

• McDonnell Douglas seemed disinterested in correcting the problem. In fact, when Composite Structures showed McDonnell Douglas that blade disbonds were its most frequently occurring and highest cost nonconformance, McDonnell Douglas took the position that Composite Structures’ quality had deteriorated under the new management team.
• Composite Structures own people were not interested in fixing the problem. They were convinced that a 50% yield was “pretty good,” and the blades’ high tech design drove the low yield.

Composite Structures’ new management did not accept the above reactions. After talking to the in-house blade team, the company’s leadership realized they had little experience in root cause failure analysis. Composite Structures needed failure analysis training, and the company brought in an outside training organization for this purpose.

The Failure Analysis

Undeterred by the McDonnell Douglas reaction and after receiving root cause failure analysis training, Composite Structures pressed ahead.  The company was determined to eliminate the rotor blade adhesive failures. With the tools provided by their failure analysis training, Composite Structures prepared a fault tree analysis to identify all potential failure causes.   The fault tree’s hypothesized causes included contamination, adhesive anomalies, component nonconformances, process issues, shelf life issues, and design issues.

After using the fault tree to identify hundreds of potential causes in the above areas, the team objectively evaluated each. Here’s what happened:

• The company inspected its clean room assembly area for food, silicone-based spray lubricants, and other contaminants. Although they found and eliminated several potential contaminant sources, these actions had no effect on the blade failure rate. Overall, the company felt it had improved its contamination discipline, but the failures continued at about the same rate.
• The team disassembled and inspected several failed blades. None of the disbonded blades’ components exhibited any dimensional nonconformances. There was nothing to fix in this area.
• The team followed 12 blades through the manufacturing process. The blades were built with conforming parts in accordance with all process requirements. Within 2 days of the autoclave operation, however, 5 blades experienced adhesive failures.

After completing the above actions, the team felt confident that the failures were not process, component conformance, or contamination driven. Having ruled out these potential failure causes, team focused on the design.

During a meeting with McDonnell Douglas, Composite Structures explained that the failures were in the adhesive, indicating inadequate strength. McDonnell Douglas stated that this would not occur if the adhesive was wide enough. Composite Structures asked McDonnell Douglas how wide the bond joint had to be, and the answer was “at least .440-inch.”

The AH-64 Apache Main Rotor Blade Bond Joint. If the area marked by the scribe lines drops below 0.440 inches, the adhesive bond can fail.

Armed with this information, Composite Structures x-rayed the failed blades (the bond joint was not visible in assembled blades, but it could be seen in an x-ray).   To everyone’s surprise, every failed adhesive joint was less than the magical 0.440-inch, and the team realized it had found its “smoking gun.”

Composite Structures next examined the blade drawing tolerances and another surprise emerged:  The design allowed adhesive widths as low as 0.330 inches. Composite Structures shared this information with McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas agreed that their drawings allowed the bond width to go below 0.440 inch, but it took the position that Composite Structures should have known this and controlled the adhesive width to tighter dimensions than those required by the engineering design.  McDonnell Douglas again stated that Composite Structures’ quality had deteriorated, and (in their opinion) that was why the adhesive widths were below 0.440 inches.

Composite Structures felt that McDonnell Douglas was ducking its responsibility, and that the rotor blade design was deficient. They were insulted by the poor quality accusations coming from McDonnell Douglas, but to address the charge, the Composite Structures team inspected blades produced earlier in the production program. (Composite Structures was the Army’s rotor blade depot repair facility, and it had older blades in-house for repair.) X-rays showed that the earlier blades displayed the same bond width variability as the current production runs.  McDonnell Douglas finally conceded that there had been no quality deterioration at Composite Structures, and in fact, later complimented the Composite Structures failure analysis team for the thoroughness and success of their root cause failure analysis.

Corrective Actions

McDonnell Douglas advised Composite Structures to define and then control new manufacturing tolerances to meet the minimum bond width dimensions, but they would not change the existing rotor blade drawings (in other words, McDonnell Douglas dumped the problem on Composite Structures). Composite Structures did as McDonnell Douglas requested.  The blade adhesive failure rate dropped to zero (the failures were completely eliminated), and the blades delivered to the Army met their blade life specification requirement.

In addition to finding and fixing the above root cause, during the course of the investigation, Composite Structures unearthed many other potential causes that could have induced an adhesive failure.  Although none of these caused the failures that led to the investigation, Composite Structures implemented corrective actions to prevent these other potential failures.

Lessons Learned

What did Composite Structures learn from this experience? In a word, plenty.  Here’s what emerged from this root cause failure analysis:

• Don’t accept the argument that state-of-the-art products necessarily have low yields. It may be that the people responsible for fixing the problem simply don’t know how to find what is causing it. Appropriate root cause failure analysis training will address this issue. The team that solved this problem consisted of the same people who had built the blades while the failures were occurring. They simply needed management direction to fix the problem, and a toolkit that allowed them to do so.
• When failures occur, assembly errors or nonconforming parts aren’t always the root cause. The part may completely conform to engineering drawings, yet still fail. When this situation exists, it’s time to re-evaluate the design.
• Identifying and ranking recurring nonconformances brings more visibility to improvement opportunities, but this increased visibility may be perceived as deterioration in quality.  Organizations seeking to identify and eliminate recurring nonconformances need to educate everyone involved (including customers) to prevent adverse perceptions.
• Don’t accept complacency. Even if your customers accept poor quality, you don’t have to.  It’s still costing you money, even if your customers aren’t complaining.
  
  

Composite Structures Results

Composite Structures did an outstanding job in finding and eliminating the cause of the Apache main rotor blade adhesive failures. They fixed a problem that had been plaguing their production efforts for 10 years, and they reduced cost, improved quality, and increased customer satisfaction as a result. The Army appreciated Composite Structures’ efforts immediately, and McDonnell Douglas ultimately did, too.

In addition to finding and fixing the actual cause of the main rotor blade adhesive failures, Composite Structures identified many other potential failure causes. A rigorous review of these potential failures resulted in the implementation of many other corrective actions.

Do you have recurring nonconformances in your organization? Are you hearing that such recurring failures are inherent to the process and there’s nothing that can be done? Would you like to eliminate these cost drivers and quality detractors?  Please call us to learn more about our Root Cause Failure Analysis training programs. We can tailor our training to your needs, and your employees can start applying these skills immediately! Root cause failure analysis is an important part of any quality improvement and cost reduction program. It worked for Composite Structures and it can work for you.

Editor’s Note:

Joe Berk, a Principal Member of our Engineering Faculty, has 30 years of engineering, management, and consulting/training experience. He teaches our courses on RCFA, FMEA, quality management, delivery performance improvement, cost reduction, engineering statistics, design of experiments, statistical process control, engineering economics, and more. He has published nine books on subjects related to the courses he teaches. His courses have been enthusiastically received by companies in diverse industries including IT and telecom, aerospace, defense, ordnance, electronics, electro-optical, energy generation and transmission, automotive, biomedical, marine, consumer goods, water treatment, and metal fabrication.

If you’d take a quick peek at our 4G+ Technologies page, which is where the LTE courses available for private classes are listed, you’d see about 20 courses on the LTE technology alone, plus additional courses on applications and services, including a course that discusses the interworking of LTE and IMS.

We offer three 3-day overview courses on LTE (LTE-C3DC, LTE-CT, LTE-FUND), which can be condensed or expanded as needed. These are suitable for a wide range of technical audiences as the first (and perhaps only) course on LTE.  We also have a couple of courses for more specialized audiences: a 5-day workshop aimed at LTE RF network designers and a 5-10 day deep-dive into LTE for hardware and software developers.  For those looking for a comprehensive curriculum on LTE, suitable for in-house engineer training, there is a complete, self-contained 5-course, 17-day long curriculum that provides a soup-to-nuts coverage of LTE.

We did not forget the nontechnical audiences either. There are two courses (LTE-BIZ and LTE-EXEC) for managers/executives, policy makers, regulators, business planner, application/service designers, marketing/sales/support, procurement specialists, and others looking for a “user friendly” or business-centered (versus technical) discussion of LTE.

Finally, we offer a couple of courses that provide a historical view of how we got to LTE and what else is there in the 4G marketplace besides LTE: Future of Wireless (2 days) and 2G to 4G+: Technologies, Drivers, and Business Case (4-5 days).

Given the number of choices available, if you’re not sure which course is best for your needs, just call us. We’ll work with you to select the course that is right for you and further tailor it as needed to your audience and business reason for taking the course.

Besides the courses listed on the 4G+ Technologies page, our e-learning page lists half a dozen 3-6 hour short-courses that are ideal for folks wanting to learn the basics of 4G and LTE on their own. Being recordings of classes previously taught live, these are far from a boring ”page turner”. Each course is taught by a top-tier instructor before a live web audience, with questions and answers. Having bought a course, you will have access to it for as long as you like, allowing you to make multiple passes through it. You will also receive additional course materials as a printable PDF, all for a low price.

If you are an individual wishing to attend one of our private (client-site instructor led) classes on LTE,  you can send us a piggyback request. If the client hosting a class matching your request allows outsiders to attend, you will be notified.  It’s also likely that as the year unwinds, we will offer a few WebLive™ classes on LTE that individuals can take advantage of.

In addition to LTE training, our LTE experts also provide remote and onsite consultation. Moreover, our research publications page lists a number of industry research reports related to LTE and related topics.

To keep up with the courses, web events, and other new programs related to LTE, take a quick look now and then at the relevant pages of our website: public classes, e-learning, 4G+ courses available for private classes, and research publications. Or, you can sign up for our newsletter, RSS Feeds, or Twitter updates. This will ensure that you will not miss out on a class or product related to LTE.

We launched a new e-learning curriculum, NowWeb™, with a dozen courses on 4G and NextGen technologies, while also expanding the repertoire of courses that can be taught in our virtual classroom (WebLive™). Importantly, in anticipation of the LTE ramp-up, we created nearly a dozen new LTE courses, making our LTE curriculum among the broadest and the deepest.

For those who like learning face-to-face, we added instructors in every region of the world, placing a highly qualified instructor on any subject within a few hours air hop of any corporate office anywhere.  For those who prefer virtual classes, we expanded the WebLive™ program to encompass more courses and more instructors. If you’re not familiar with WebLive™,  it’s our state-of-the-art virtual classroom that enables live, customized classes taught by real human beings in real-time with two-way audio and video interactivity. It’s the next best thing to being there.

What has not changed is that we continue to employ instructors who possess at least 15 years of subject matter expertise and rotate continually between consulting and teaching, adding real-world depth to their instruction and superior communications skills to their consulting assignments.  We also make sure our guys and gals are among the top 15% in their field. That, combined with our competitive prices,  translates into a quality/value ratio that would be hard to match elsewhere.

Enough bragging.  We have several new programs planned for 2011, and I will tell you about them as the year unwinds. You can keep up with the upcoming new programs by sneaking a peak now and then at the What’s New feature on our home page. You can catch up with all that was added last year by clicking on the What’s New page. For even zippier updates, you can sign up for our newsletter, RSS Feeds, or Twitter tweats.

Before I sign off, I’d like to invite you to write to me about areas that you see as underserved in the market. Many of the courses added in 2010 owe their existence to the ideas contributed by our customers. Thank you, and “see you in class” in 2011!

The official unveiling of the WANG PC had gone well and the assembled crowd “oohed” and “aahed” when the device itself first appeared. The unit they were viewing, they were told, had a full 10 megabytes of disk space but the crowd went wild when it was announced that a 20 megabyte drive – twice the size of what they were viewing - was coming, and soon!

During the Q&A that followed, a member of the press asked one of the marketing VPs “Does WANG support Unix?” The VP covered the microphone for a few brief moments of panicked collaboration with others on the stage after which he responded to the query with what seemed a rather unusual answer: “WANG has no policy on eunuchs, specifically, but we are an equal opportunity employer.” I am guessing that the VP was as puzzled by the question as the audience was by the answer. It is clear now that the VP was simply not up-to-speed on any operating system besides the Microsoft MS-DOS O/S that his computer supported, and certainly did not know about Unix. What is not evident is if that VP ever realized his mistake. I, for one, never told him.

Ignorant or Stupid?

How to pronounce the new term? Is it pronounced IZ-DEN” or “I-S-D-N”, “A-T-M”, or “atom”, “ipsec” or “I-P-sec”? How does that new technology work, really? Does wireless backhaul require a wireless connection? Are Carrier Ethernet and Metro Ethernet the same thing? How about SONET and SDH? How about SONET and WDM? “What is Unix” rather than “Who are Eunuchs?” You can’t always guess right and, unless everyone else is a clueless neophyte, you can’t fake it either. Only training can help you to truly understand and to truly put your newly gained knowledge to work.

The mistake at WANG was avoidable. It was one of those common mistakes that fits well into the category of “ignorant” - rather than “stupid” – and a mistake which just a bit more familiarity with the subject matter would have helped the VP avoid. How many times does this happen as one moves into a new area? The answer is “a lot more than you might realize”. But, how can one avoid it? It is clear that training is mandatory. The type of training preferably comes from an experienced practitioner in the subject area rather than from a traditional trainer who is just learning the material him or herself. Yes, this is an area where reading will help but it is not the same thing as a live, interactive, education session or, as I am increasingly describing it, real “knowledge transfer”.

Knowledge Transfer on a Budget

Information is abundant, thanks to the Internet and the proliferation of Wikis, blogs and other web resources. Knowledge is information that has been processed through the mind of the expert and rendered useful through the filter of their experience. Knowledge is ready to put to use and with less risk than applying information in its raw form. It is knowledge that we truly need and knowledge is expensive, but no one can risk the consequences of lack of knowledge. The question is, in a time of budget crisis, when training programs are the first to feel the financial scalpel, how does one obtain knowledge most cost effectively?

Weighing, for the moment, the value of the phrase “you get what you pay for” first consider any training that may have come along with services or products that you have purchased but have not yet taken advantage of. Didn’t that new switch have a two day training course? Do your vendors give you training credits as you purchase new products or upgrades? Are online seminars available or can you ask the vendor to let their expert address your technicians and engineers for a few hours? Of course, “you get what you pay for” brings to mind another phrase: “buyer beware”. That very same vendor does have other objectives.

So, what about paid training, consultation and collaboration? There are a few guidelines in this area that can provide some guidance and help you get the most for your training investment.

Internal Experts. Companies have internal experts – patent holders, inventors and experts in their fields – who are the best source of knowledge but internal experts come with a price. In some cases the value of the experts’ time to the company is so high that training will not yield the same return on investment as the next big breakthrough, patent or discovery. And, more often than not, the internal expert is not a good knowledge transfer agent and lacks the skills to share their knowledge effectively. Often an outside trainer, or knowledge transfer agent, is needed.

Venue/Format. The Web is the least expensive venue for knowledge transfer and eliminates the need for either trainer or trainee to travel. What is lost is the human interaction of being in person, in the same place in real time. Each situation is different, though, and web-based training is gaining in popularity, especially the live, interactive variety. The tools are getting better and participants are getting better at using those tools. In-person traditional training, especially when it takes advantage of exercises and labs, is the best and the best of the best is the “off site” where training is conducted away from the office to reduce interruptions. The main consideration, beyond saving a few dollars on the meeting room, is getting the most value from the investment of time of the participants. For instance, the cost for a class participant whose annual cost averages US$100,000 with salary and overheads is $450 per day which exceeds the cost per day for most training programs, even on site.

Do Your Homework. In training, as in all other areas, no two companies are identical and, in fact, the company that did your last training might not be the one to do your next training. Qualify and re-qualify your knowledge sources and be certain you are getting the best available company for the job. Interview the expert who will be doing the training, check their credentials, articles, books and other differentiators and be certain they are aligned with the direction of your organization. Training should improve skills and focus energy, not be a distraction from the core business.

Customization. Customization need not be expensive and, in the current economic environment, many trainers and training organizations who have never before considered customization may be enticed into doing customization for a modest fee or even free of charge in order to get your business. The best situation, however, is to work with a training group that has always customized training content to the audience as they are set up to customize and know what they are doing. Review the outline, ask questions and be certain of the value of the material to your audience. Some ways to cut costs while customizing training are to consider pre-reading or web-based training to cut down the length of training. Also consider having experts attend days two and three of a three day training program while only the beginners attend day one. There are many different ways that training can be customized. The key is to take the time to customize, to not accept a one-size-fits-all off the shelf course that will provide less return on investment than one that has been custom-fitted to your specific training needs.

Collaboration. If your chosen training organization is not collaborative, interactive, responsive and helpful, then maybe it is time to choose a new one. Even if they have been easy to work with in the past and have been highly collaborative and aren’t now maybe they, too, have been hit by the budget crunch. The people who will provide knowledge to you must be collaborative and be engaged in the process. Just selling you an “off the shelf” program is very unlikely to be your best option.

Assessment / Screening. Years back training almost never occurred without a pre-test to qualify a person for participation, testing during training and a post-test to assess the success of the program. These days, mainly for reasons of money and time budget, assessments are either skipped entirely or done in a very cursory way. With the increased scrutiny on expenditures, and considering the big investment training can represent, formal assessment to screen participants as well as to assess their knowledge increase as a result of training is just good business.

Return on Investment. An RoI is required everywhere else, why not in the area of knowledge transfer? If you really think about it, knowledge is a raw material that is needed by virtually every organization to assure success and the impact of applying knowledge can be measured. Apply an RoI to training just as to any other area.

Eunuchs or Unix?

So, what will it be, Unix or eunuchs? You should wish that it were this simple. You can see and hear eunuchs and know something is wrong but what about the small errors, misunderstandings and lack of knowledge that you don’t see? What about those little problems that find their way into the design and delivery or your product or service? What about the errors that cause missed deadlines, returns or a low market evaluation of your product or services. Start now to develop a knowledge transfer program that brings the most value to your organization.

Editor's Note: Jim Cavanagh, having worked 30+ years in telecom (while teaching hundreds of classes and publishing half a dozen books), is a knowledge transfer agent par excellence, his areas of expertise being everything IP and optical networking. And, yes, Eogogics courses have always been customized and taught by passionate subject matter experts such as Jim rather than run-of-the-mill trainers. Jim is also the teacher featured in our Now@Web(TM) courses on NextGen, MPLS, and IPTV.

We call such courses Now@Web™, meaning they are on the Web and are available Now! Perhaps not very clever, but the name gets the point across. These are courses available anytime and anywhere.

Recognizing that different audiences have different needs, we cover each topic in three different ways: “Technical deep dives” aimed at technical professionals; “quickie overviews” suitable for managers/executives, decision/policy makers, marketing/sales, OSS/BSS folks, consultants, attorneys; and “mini-courses” that boil the essentials down into a short, one-hour long presentation. Thus, no matter what your background or interest, you will find a course that covers the material at just the right level for you needs.

The full Now@Web™ line-up includes: Next Generation Network (NGN), MPLS backbone, and IPTV. Also, on the wireless side: 4G technologies and services, technologies that enable 4G (OFDM, MIMO), LTE (overview, technical) and WiMAX (overview, technical). And, finally, three mini-courses: WiMAX, LTE, and NextGen Technologies.

Courses aimed at general audiences are half day long; those meant for technical audiences are mostly one day long. The mini-courses are, of course, only one hour in duration. Being self-study and available 24/7, you can play, pause, and re-play at your convenience, from work or home. Take a course from beginning to end all in one sitting, or spread it out over a period of time. Catching up with the state-of-the-art of telecom could not be any easier!

They are affordable, too! The half-day courses are only $250 and the full-day courses are only $425. That’s quite a bargain, compared with the $700-$1,000 price tag of a typical one-day live course, not to mention the expense of travel to the class venue. You can make a good deal even better when you buy $1,000 worth of courses at one time. That will get you a 10% discount on top of the already low prices.

So check these courses out at: www.eogogics.com/now-web. Let me know what you think. If you have ideas for future WebLive™ or Now@Web™ offerings, I’d like to hear them. You can reach me at kk@eogogics.com.

If you have to think deeply to remember when you last made your suppliers compete, it’s been too long.   Supplier competition is a powerful tool for reducing cost, and if you don’t use it, your costs are too high.  You might think you don’t have any problems, and maybe you don’t, but you’re still missing opportunities for improved profitability.  You may be in a situation where you don’t have to compete for your work and cost is not an issue, but that’s highly unusual and it probably won’t last long.

Groundwater Arsenic Reduction:  A Windfall Market

A real company, which we will refer to as Watco, faced exactly this situation in its water treatment business a few years ago.  Watco sells large custom-engineered treatment plants for municipal and commercial water purveyors.  Watco was recognized as the dominant water services company in what was a small market.   Due to Watco’s position in the market, its engineers didn’t worry about keeping costs down; in fact, they did just the opposite.  Watco designed the battleships of the water treatment business, with all metal construction, extensive instrumentation, and an approach that guaranteed the plants would be expensive.  Watco used its same preferred suppliers for years, without much emphasis on keeping costs down.  It was a comfortable arrangement, but it was bound to end.

In 2003 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tightened the maximum allowed arsenic contaminant levels in drinking water.  Suddenly, the water from thousands of previously-compliant wells required arsenic reduction.   The arsenic-laden wells were particularly pronounced in the southwestern United States, where arsenic naturally occurred in groundwater.  Watco’s senior management thought they had a windfall.  What they didn’t realize was that this federally-induced windfall would attract hungry competition.  The new competitors came to market with creative and lower cost approaches.

The initial results were predictable.  Watco watched as others made inroads into what had previously been regarded as a Watco market.  To Watco’s credit, the company did not sit on its hands.  The engineers and managers knew they had to find a way to reduce their costs quickly, or a significant chunk of the arsenic market would disappear.

Watco’s problems were not unusual, and they had two approaches to address the issue.  The company could reduce its margins substantially (not surprisingly, this did not go over well with Watco’s corporate chieftains), or it could find a way to reduce costs without eroding margins.  The guys at Watco opted for Door No. 2.

Watco’s approach was similar to that of many others who design and deliver large-scale, custom-engineered products – they didn’t manufacture anything.  Watco’s water treatment business ran on a project-by-project basis, and it would be inefficient to set up a factory.  Watco purchased or subcontracted everything.   Pipes, valves, vessels, treatment media, instrumentation, the control system, and even site construction and installation went to outside suppliers.

To be competitive, Watco recognized it had to address the existing design approach and its long-term, cozy relationships with its suppliers.  Here’s what they did:

• Watco took a hard look at its design, and in a classic value-engineering approach, the company stripped out all non-essential features.  Watco made sure that its designs met client specifications; they also eliminated any features that went beyond what the spec requirements.  This effort will be the subject of a future article.
• Watco introduced supplier competition on nearly every component used in its water treatment plants.  The company realized that virtually 100% of its costs went to supplier-purchased goods, and most of the cost reductions would have to come from lower supplier prices.

Watco’s first steps involved identifying all sole-source components and services (that was relatively easy; initially, it was almost everything).   Watco found that multiple suppliers were available for nearly everything, and they proceeded to solicit bids.  The company’s existing suppliers, not surprisingly, came back with substantially lower prices.   It was a sobering experience for Watco’s management when they realized the opportunities they had missed earlier.

Watco had a few instances in which it had to buy from sole source suppliers, as these suppliers were the only ones providing a particular component or service.  Watco could have simply lived with the prices provided by these sole source suppliers, but it did not.  Watco evaluated vertically integrating into these areas, and it let the suppliers know it was doing so.  In many cases, such an approach would not have been feasible, but Watco found that just the appearance of its evaluations motivated suppliers to drop prices.

A Suggested Supplier Reduction Approach

How can you efficiently replicate Watco’s approach for introducing supplier competition?  Here’s a suggested approach:

1. Identify everything your organization buys, what you pay for it, and if you compete it.
2. Identify the high cost items that are not competed.  These items offer the greatest potential for cost reduction and these should be competed first (even the lower-cost items, though, offer potential for competition-induced cost reduction).  
3. Determine if competition will lower the cost.  If the item is a standard component and you’re a small market (for example, light bulbs from General Electric), it’s not likely that competition will help much.  If the item is custom made to your specifications, however, competition offers great cost reduction potential. 
4. Identify suppliers you want to bid.  You need to research the suppliers well.  There’s no return in buying from a low quality or persistently-delinquent source.
5. Develop a specification that defines exactly what you want, and ask for supplier inputs.  The suppliers may recognize areas where unnecessary cost is built into the specification.
6. Bid the work, but reject nonresponsive bids (if a supplier can’t get a responsive proposal to you on time, there’s nothing but trouble ahead).
7. After selecting the lowest-cost responsive supplier, ask them for a lower price (it never hurts to ask).

There are risks in introducing supplier competition, of course.  If a supplier does not understand its costs, or if it underbids the work and hopes to somehow make it up later, the supplier may default (you need to critically assess suppliers; you can’t just give work to the low bidder).  New suppliers present a performance risk (you need to assess if the supplier can do the work).  If your description of the work is vague, you may get a service or a product that doesn’t meet your needs (your specs have to be exact, correct, and unambiguous).   And finally, your existing supplier may dump you if you attempt to compete the work.  If you’re a major part of their business, they probably won’t walk away, but if your work is small or difficult, an existing supplier may lose interest.  If this happens you could be in a worse position than you were before you introduced competition.  You have to predict existing suppliers’ likely reactions.  It’s a subjective assessment, as is the case in many business decisions.

Watco’s Results

Watco did very well with its supplier cost reduction effort, creating a win-win situation for itself and its clients.   Watco won nearly every project it pursued in the southwestern United States, winning more than 50 competitively-bid projects with an average price of just under a million dollars per treatment plant.  While doing so in an intensely-competitive environment, Watco did not have to erode its margins.  Based on these successes, Watco held on to its dominant water treatment equipment market position.  Finally, Watco’s clients benefited enormously with sharply lower water treatment equipment costs.

Supplier competition is an important element of any cost reduction program.  It worked for Watco and it can work for you.

Editor’s Note:   Want to optimize your cost structure? Bring this expertise into your organization!  Our new Cost Reduction: Opportunities and Strategies course, taught by Joe Berk, can help you achieve measurable cost reduction quickly and in a risk-managed manner.  The course teaches hard techniques grounded in practical experience – no esoteric, touchy-feely, or abstract concepts here. The technquies are applicable across industries, not just to manufacturing.

“WCET1” is one of a pair of Eogogics courses tied to the IEEE Wireless Communication Engineering Technologies curriculum: It covers such RF (physical layer) topics as: The basics of radio system design and analysis, addressing operating frequency, available spectrum, channel bandwidth, modulation schemes, radio access techniques, basic and advanced antenna systems, using equipment specifications in link budget analysis, and performing path loss analysis based on the type of propagation environment and signal distortions caused by time displacement of radio signals in non-line-of-sight environments.

The course will focus on both the theory and the practice of wireless communications engineering. Come prepared for extensive in-class hand-on work that will make use of a scientific calculator and laptop for running Excel spreadsheets.  We want you to go away not only having understood the key concepts but also well practiced in how to apply them on the job.

The other course in our WCET curriculum, “WCET2”, covers wireless access technologies, network service architecture, network management and security, facilities infrastructure, agreements, standards, policies, and regulation, and more.  Follow the course link for a detailed course outline.

Courses “WCET1” and “WCET2” are taught by Ron Bellavich and Frank Ohrtman, respectively, both Principal Instructors with long careers in wireless engineering, consulting, and instruction. (Click on their names to check out their bios.)

If you have 7 or more participants, these courses can be presented onsite at your corporate offices.  If you have 5 or more participants, we can teach them WebLive™ in our Web-based virtual classroom. If you would like to find out more about these courses or other Eogogics offerings, please give our Sales team a shout at sales@eogogics.com or 1 888 364 6442 (1 888 EOGOGICs).  Happy new year!