Crossover concepts: manufacturing devops and process debt
- Summary:
- Outdated processes and artificial divisions between innovators and operations people - a lack of manufacturing devops - hold back enterprises in myriad ways
Devops fuses the two together. There's no wall, no disconnect. Teams work together to deliver results, and if things don't work at first, they collaborate to resolve the problems rapidly. This allows for a more iterative approach that achieves better results because it's able to rapidly test and refine new systems.
While reading Techmeme tonight, I stumbled across a parallel example of what software people would call devops, but applied in the field of lithium-ion battery production.
It turns out that manufacturing has traditionally followed what software people call the 'waterfall' model of developing concepts that then get 'thrown over the wall' to the production teams. As I read the story of battery production innovator 24M, as told by Quartz, I couldn't help thinking this was essentially telling a story about applying the devops ethos to manufacturing.
There may be a way to revolutionize batteries, [24M founder Yet-Ming Chiang] says, but right now it is not in the laboratory. Instead, it's on the factory floor. Ingenious manufacturing, rather than an ingenious leap in battery chemistry, might usher in the new electric age.
The article tells how 24M sought to develop a new type of lithium-ion battery that resurrected a design approach called flow battery. But the developers discovered that flow batteries could only work at massive scale, whereas if they applied some of their innovative production concepts to traditional static batteries, they could create a disrputively low-cost alternative to traditional lithium-ion battery production:
The result was a manufacturing platform that currently spits out a battery cell in about two and a half minutes. The machine that does it isn't the size of a factory floor, but of a large refrigerator ...
[M]ost importantly, the machine would be priced at about $11 million [The cost for an entry-level battery plant is currently more than $100 million]. Hence, the startup cost of getting into lithium-ion battery manufacturing would plummet.
Technical debt == process debt
Another concept that's a commonplace in the software industry is the notion of technical debt. This refers to the build-up of inefficient software code due to people taking short cuts to meet immediate goals, or where early workarounds are still in place even though better ways of achieving the same result have since become available.
It turns out that traditional lithium-ion battery manufacturing is based on a huge edifice of technical debt that dates back to its original creation by Sony in 1991, as the Quartz article explains:
Sony ... had to quickly figure out how to manufacture this new kind of battery on a commercial scale. Providence stepped in: As it happened, increasingly popular compact discs were beginning to erode the market for cassette tapes, of which Sony was also a major manufacturer. The tapes were made on long manufacturing lines that coated a film with a magnetic slurry, dried it, cut it into long strips, and rolled it up. Looking around the company, Sony’s lithium-ion managers now noticed much of this equipment, and its technicians, standing idle.
It turned out that the very same equipment could also be used for making lithium-ion batteries. These too could be made by coating a slurry on to a film, then drying and cutting it. In this case the result isn’t magnetic tape, but battery electrodes.
This equipment, and those technicians, became the backbone of the world's first lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant, and the model for how they have been made ever since. Today, factories operating on identical principles are turning out every commercial lithium-ion battery on the planet.
Yes, you read that right, and you should weep. The world's lithium-ion production methodology is based on a 25-year-old process that was a workaround to harness idle production lines designed for a completely different product. Even as far-sighted a technology company as Tesla is investing $3 billion dollars in building a so-called 'gigafactory' to replicate this band-aid production process.
What we know as technical debt in the software world is endemic throughout the enterprise world in the form of process debt. Most enterprise processes are an accumulation of workarounds and habits, most of which are no longer needed in a connected, digital environment. But they continue to persist because no one has taken the trouble to consider whether they remain relevant today.
Indeed one can even argue that the failure to apply devops principles to activities as diverse as software development and manufacturing processes is itself a form of process debt, dating from a time when cross-functional collaboration was far harder to co-ordinate than it is in today's digitally connected world.
If this argument is correct, there are many enterprise activities that are ripe for replacement and renewal, with significant repercussions for incumbent processes and products. What holds true for lithium-ion battery production may be equally true for an entire catalog of outdated processes that are costly, convoluted hangovers from a past we can now rapidly leave behind us.
Image credit: © Andres Rodriguez - Fotolia.com.