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           Home Efficiency

8/24/2016

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Home Efficiency in the Yard


As I was mowing the lawn last Friday afternoon, I was thinking about efficiency. I usually cut it right after work to get it out of the way and free up some of the weekend time and Friday night time. I try to keep the entire job of mowing and weed eating to one hour. For the most part I cut a diagonal pattern in the front, back, and side. I think it gives a professional look so for me I think I’m looking for the right balance of quality and efficiency. I’ll call it “efficient quality”.


I knew United Parcel Service (UPS) Drivers only make right turns. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=3005890&page=1   They have computers, codes and programming that allows them to plot out right-turn routes. For UPS right-turn routes saved 28,541,472 million miles, and three million gallons of fuel. Right hand turns take less turning radius/distance and involve less traffic. So I started to think “Will I cut my grass faster if I cut in patterns that only take right turns”? We’ll the answer is not. The success in roads is the length of the pattern of the turn in lanes. Your yard has no lanes so left versus right is a moot point.


There are a number of factors that can affect the amount of time it takes including thickness, height, wetness, dryness, number of hills, and the number of yard features you have flowerbeds, fence, etc.
So with a bit of research I found the keys to the fastest mowing:


1. Start with Features. If your lawn has features that will be an obstacle to mowing in a uniform pattern, you can usually save time by getting those areas out of the way first.  
2. Work in Rows. Mowing in rows is usually the fastest, most efficient way to cut your lawn.


·         The key to fastest mowing is to make fewer turns so you can work more quickly.
·         If your lawn is wider than long cut in line with the longest part or horizontally. If it is longer than wide you should mow in rows parallel to the width.


3. Concentric Circles. Allow for continual cutting with no turns.


So far making the least amount of turns wins and experts say, proper maintenance of your mower also plays a key role in faster mowing.  Mowing is also done faster when you do it early in the morning and avoid it when the grass is wet from heavy rain. Want to see more arguments on the topic visit these sites:


http://homeguides.sfgate.com/fastest-ways-mow-yard-40022.html
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/lawn-garden/how-to/a5935/how-to-mow-a-lawn-patterns/
http://blog.lawneq.com/faster-mowing-methods-mowing-in-half-the-time/


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Efficiency

8/21/2016

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Amusement Parks and Queuing Theory

As summer winds down we were recently trying to get the most out of our last few sunny days at a local theme park. We have season passes so we visit at a number of different hours of the day and days of the week. There are days when lines are short and days when they are long. The lines seem even longer on the days where it is sunny and 98 with high humidity. We usually skip those days.
Anyway, we have a number of rides each of us likes. One of the favorites is the bumper cars. On this day the line was shorter than average but still moving slow. As I looked out into the bumper car track I noticed 2 cars were not working and pushed into a corner and still in another corner was yet another car. I thought to myself “how can you have 3 cars out of service” especially 3 out of 12. That’s 25% wow.

Then I thought of how much longer it takes to reduce the length of the line with the broken cars. I noticed this once before at the park when we were waiting for the old time rumble seat cars that follow a track. It seemed like such a long time before the next car came. We “wait” for hundreds of hours per week in our daily lives. Think of how many total hours you spend in a year at traffic lights.
A calculation for the wait time for a theme park attraction is the number of people in line during an hour minus the attraction's hourly capacity. Then you take that number and divide it by the hourly capacity. Then multiply that result by 60 (for minutes in an hour). The result is the average wait time during that hour. So let’s look at the example above using 75 people in line to see what the difference would be.

All cars working:
75 people - 144 (hourly capacity) = (-69)/144 =.47 x 60 = 28.2 minutes
Hourly capacity is 12 cars X a 5 minute turn around which equals 12 rides per hour or 144 capacity.

3 cars broken:
75 people - 84 (hourly capacity) = (-69)/84 =.82 x 60 = 49.2 minutes
Capacity is 9 cars X 5 minute turn around which equals 7 rides per hour or 84 rides per hour capacity.
 
Got a favorite ride at an amusement park? Check out the wait times at queue times.com

https://queue-times.com/

What do you spending time waiting for most in life?


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Disguised quality

8/7/2016

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Is there such as thing as disguised quality? Can you think of any? I thought of the irony as we ate dinner out last Friday night. We went to an establishment that has been in the area for quite some time but we had never tried it.

So we ventured out to our local fish house. It has been there for over 20 years but is a slight drive from our house so it just happens we had not been there before. It has probably never been featured on “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives” http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/diners-drive-ins-and-dives.html but would most certainly qualify as a “Dive”.

As we were seated I soaked in the atmosphere. The typical beachy - New Orleans décor you might see in in any fish restaurant. Then I thought, I had to take a picture of the seat in our booth as you can see here. The entire seat looked like this and all of the seats looked like this. They were the same seats since the restaurant opened 20 years ago and that was part of the allure part of the “Disguised quality”. Who would think a restaurant that looked like that could produce some of the best quality food?
Here’s the challenge, can you think of some other areas in the “quality world” with the best quality that you might not notice right off?

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    Author

    Robert Kent Six Sigma Black Belt and improvement professional

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