Post Office
It’s rare these days of online bill paying and email that I even get to the post office. It’s even rarer that we put innovation in with a sentence that includes the USPS considering the dire economic condition that it is in. Of course, since I don’t buy stamps that much I had to use three stamps of different amounts to get to the 44 cents that is required. I then purchased a book of the ‘forever stamps’. Now I know that the ‘forever stamps’ are nothing new, but they are innovative(especially for the Post Office).
In the past you could always buy the 1 or 2 cents stamps to make up the difference when postage rates increased. But in reality it cost the USPS the same to make a 44 cent as a 1 cent stamp so at some price point(and I never could find it on the internet) the USPS looses money when it has to buy low priced stamps. The ‘forever stamp’ at least it’s loosing money, but is really getting customers to buy a discounted price in advance.
Triz40.com
My thoughts on the www.triz40.com web site are mixed. I like when someone has gathered good ideas and best practices in one location. Is this the end all of ideas, no.
Personally, I really enjoy going to new vendors and manufacturers to see how they make things, what processes they have in places, what methods do they use, etc. I take away what I see and maybe some day will use it or some variation of it. It’s the CASE method of learning. Copy And Steal Everything!
One of the easiest kaizen events I did was a copy of how a sister plant made boom sections. I was at this plant with our Fabrication Plant Manager when I first saw this method. I never did understand why he never did duplicate the process. I finally did it 5 years later. Needless to say that manager is no longer with the company.
Triz40 is really just a check list of what to try in different situations. It’s a collection of best practices. I think the difficulty it overcomes is using known technology in different applications that we normally would not consider. One of the more creative guys here at work solved one of our difficulties in handling long tubes by basically copying a straw dispenser like what you would see at any fast food restaurant.
Unfortunately, Triz tells us something about our society and how we train our future engineers. We’ve moved away from simple, creative ideas to having to sort through a data base of ideas. Are we teaching creativity or are we teaching how to search the internet?
I agree with your nice post.
ReplyDeleteToday almost everything is built for “dummies”. We are trying to make products and services more user intuitive. However this methodology comes in package with a side effect. We encourage people to think less and kill creativity by providing easy “dummy” guide lines.