Austin, TX: Cisco/Flextronics

Sunday, January 6

The LFM class of 2009 departed for our two week domestic plant tour today. The first leg of our trip brought us from Boston to Austin, TX in order to visit Cisco, Flextronics and Dell. We arrived in Austin on Sunday afternoon and went in search of lunch prior to any required meetings. Most of us found some great BBQ at Stubb's BBQ on Red River Avenue which was just around the corner from our hotel. Talk about some good food! We had some delicious pulled pork sandwiches and I had the mashed yams which were excellent! If you make it to Austin, Stubb’s is one of the many famous BBQ joints in town and definitely deserves a visit. After lunch we had our first meeting with Prof. Shoji Shiba who learned about lean manufacturing from Deming himself and has had a very distinguished career helping manufacturing companies around the world become better at what they do. We are very privileged, as were the previous 20 LFM classes, to have him join us and teach us to see problem areas in the plants and companies that we will visit. Through an introductory lecture, Prof Shiba taught us his 7 key points for observing the invisible and unknown as well as the visible proof of corporate pros and cons. In brief, his 7 key points were to 1) observe details, 2) observe the periphery, 3) observe the unusual, 4) observe what is missing, 5) observe symbols, 6) observe shadows (try to see beyond your mental barriers), and finally, 7) observe comparisons. I hope to gain a lot of insight from Prof. Shiba during this tour on these ideas as well as to start to see the manufacturing facilities as he sees them.

After our lecture, we headed out to The Main Event where Cisco and Flextronics were hosting us for the evening. If you have ever been to Dave & Buster’s or Chuck-E-Cheese, you get a general sense of The Main Event. They have a bunch of arcade games, bowling alleys, a mini-golf course, a rock-climbing facility and a laser tag arena. A competition of bowling, arcades and laser tag kept our hosts and us very busy for the entirety of the evening with the laser tag being our favorite. Definitely a lot of fun was had by all! As the evening ended, we returned to our hotel and most of the class headed down to 6^th Street to see the local Austin nightlife for the rest of the night and you can check out Sean’s blog to see some of the action photos from the night (definitely check out the photo of the flaming Dr. Pepper’s that they had).