Gspi's Virtual Day (or The Case Versus The Shifting Eight Hours)

GSPI’s Virtual Day (or The Case Versus The Shifting Eight Hours?) Nostalgic feelings of things past cannot be denied by most GSPI’s employees, composed of a majority of ex-NSC employees, but the wisdom of what work best then might be of minor consequence now

by Arturo B. del Ayre

if most of us do not consider its effects to our personal, as well as corporate, lives. Thus, with the coming of a new and hopefully prosperous new year for GSPI, a paradigm change is hereby proposed.

Global Steel instituted the existing Shifting Schedule on February 2004. Officially, a particular GSPI day starts at 6:00 a.m. and ends the next day, however, all transactions occurring between 12:00 midnight to 6:00 a.m., now dubbed as “C” shift (2200Hto 0600H) are logged the preceding day. Evening (“B”) shifts start at 2:00 p.m. and ends at 10:00 p.m. (1400H to 2200H). Any shifting scheme affects the monitoring of process parameters, delays and shift events; production recording; personnel attendance and leaves, among others.

Under the GSPI’s scheme, the three shifts span the real-time present and the real-time next day. In contrast, NSC’s scheme approximated more the real-time present date for all the three shifts. As such, the following interrelated scenarios are illustrated to prove that the present scheme, although aimed at originality and in consonance with other Global Steel’s group of companies, is: A. UnREAListic ™ Real-time Daily Production encompasses two days. “C” Shift Production is dated the previous day. ™ Reports do not really contain what actually transpired during the whole real-time present date.

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B. INCOMPATIBLE ™ Real-time on modern computer systems is designed to be forward-looking. ™ Real-time programming is difficult, if not impossible. ™ Time-series data are prone to decision-making errors.

- C. Un-NATURAL ™ As per the Philippine Labor Code, overtimes are work hours rendered AFTER the first eight hours for a day. ™ Data processes/shift events happen before the real-time date.

A. UnREAListic

™ Real-Time Daily Production encompasses two days. “C” Shift Production is dated the previous day. Only the production during shifts “A” and “B” are the real production for a particular REAL-TIME date. “C” shift production are post-dated, the so-called “the shifting eight hours”, thus the production between 12 midnight (0000H) is virtually produced prior to shifts “A” and “B”. A coil packed on, for example, 31C December, 2006 were actually saleable on real-time 01C January, 2007 to our corporate customers, unaware of the 8-hour discrepancy or the GSPI’s work-shifts. Any complaint would be Change is inevitable, unless we cannot learn from lessons of the past.

2 seemingly difficult to trace, except of course using the coil number. Process audits are also unreliable due to erroneous recording of date of production, a hold-over of NSC’s scheme owing to the fact that old habits die hard. Holding times for Work-in-Process, particularly for “C” shift outputs after 12 midnight, are virtually prolonged with the addition of approximately 16 hours (to account for “A” and “B” shifts). ™ Reports do not really contain what actually transpired during the whole real-time present date. Daily production reports, usually prepared right after “C” shift, are prone to error. Due to a very short time allotted for its preparation, “C” shifts end at 6 a.m. while reports are due 8 a.m., corrections are relegated during the weekly summaries. Meanwhile, delays are recorded using real-time, thus correlation between production and delay occurrence is tedious. Furthermore, delay recording are prone to encoding errors because most are now more accustomed to post-dating for “C” shifts. Incident reports, historically based on shift logs, have to be verbosely annotated to indicate real-time dates in addition to the recorded GSPI shift dates. Say, “power failure occurred 0200H 31 Dec 2006 (actually, 0200H 01 Jan 2007) . . .”

B. INCOMPATIBLE

™ Real-time on modern computer systems is designed to be forward-looking. Digital clocks, applied on computers, run from 00:00 to 23:59. The IBM PC was the first widely available personal computer that came equipped with date/time hardware built into the motherboard, and subsequent add-on peripheral boards included real-time clock chips with on-board battery back-up. Most modern IBM-compatible computers follow the IBM standard. The 6-hour (0000H to 0600H) discrepancy was evident during the C-shift production run on 31 December, 2006. Production for that particular shift (real-time: 01 January 2007) were un-encoded because the GMIC’s system date (also: 01 January 2007) discarded all input after 12:00 midnight stating that input date cannot be less than the system date. Fortunately, after some system tweaks, the issue was resolved by using the real-time date. ™ Real-time programming is difficult, if not impossible. Even using the most advanced computer systems and the most sophisticated programming software, the 8hour discrepancy is too difficult to capture. In subtle defiance to the GSPI’s scheme of beginning each day on “A” shift, these in-house software applications to include Personnel Attendance Monitoring, Application for Leave of Absence, and Overtime Monitoring used real-time dates for programming simplicity. To consider the GSPI’s scheme for these Oracle-based programs would be a programming headache! Actual Shifting Schedules for line personnel start on “C” shift, not “A” shift. It is noteworthy, moreover, that the printed Shifting Schedules are presented to start “A”. ™ Time-series data are prone to decision-making errors. A typical example is in production process parameters monitoring. 8.0 7.0 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 0.0

8.0 7.0 6.0 5.0 4.0 3.0 2.0 1.0 0.0

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31.12.2006 Tank1

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Tank2

Graph A

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01.01.2007 Tank3 Tank4

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31.12.2006 Tank1

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01.01.2007 Tank3 Tank4

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The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. --Nathaniel Branden

B

3 Compare the two graphs showing PKL Tanks concentration parameters above using exactly the same dataset. Graph A shows the straight forward layout where date and shift data are both used as axis. (This graph was manipulated to conform to the GSPI’s shifting scheme.) Graph B shows the same data but arranged on a typical time series. Discrepancies are very obvious in Tank 4 time series whereas the respective data during the C-shift, particularly those after 12 midnight, are now situated prior to A and B shifts. Other Tanks’ parameters have also similarly shifted, although they are very subtle.

C. Un-NATURAL

™ As per the Philippine Labor Code, overtimes are work rendered AFTER the first 8 hours of a day. There was one true anecdote during the initial implementation of GSPI’s shifting scheme. A worker erroneously claimed that his overtime was for work rendered “C” shift because he already worked during “A” shift. Unnatural though it seems, the worker was virtually correct to claim overtime for “C” based on the assumption that each GSPI’s day begins “A” shift. Unfortunately, the Philippine Labor Code implementing rules stipulates that overtime is claimed after the first eight hours of work, specifically the first eight hours after 12 midnight. Thus, while production schedules follow the A-B-C scheme, the personnel shifting schedule follows C-B-A scheme. ™ Data processes/shift events happen before the real-time date. Events during the “C” shift cannot be correctly correlated outright without manipulation or correction of respective dates. In the annealing process, example cycles shown below are virtually unrealistic:

In both examples, solving for the durations of respective stages of annealing would result to errors. In Example A: Purging and Heating virtually occur before Charging with respect to real-time. In Example B: Air Cooling seemingly occurred before Soaking, or Discharging occurs prior to Water Cooling, an obvious impossibility. Using the GSPI Date for a Six-Sigma project could be utterly impossible, except tweaking each individual unreal-time to its equivalent real-time dates. On another situation, “C” shift events are post-dated. When untoward incidents happen during the shift, the events are logged at GSPI using a previous date. The problem, moreover, is pronounced when dealing with the same events in coordination with the outside world, say government agencies, which uses the real-time scheme. The result: two official documents reporting the same events do not share the same dates.

The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance. --Nathaniel Branden

4

TIME SHIFT

Shift work was once characteristic of manufacturing industry, where it has a clear effect of increasing the use that can be made of capital equipment, and allowing for up to three times the production compared to an eight-hour day. A day 1 may be divided into three shifts each of eight hours, say for example be 00:00 to 08:00, 08:00 to 16:00, 16:00 to 24:00 (times are given in the 24-hour clock). Generally, "first” shift is sometimes referred to as the day shift, with "second” shift running from late afternoon to nightfall, and "third” shift being the night shift. Colloquially, the “graveyard shift” is the shift that starts at midnight. 2 Ancient custom has a new day start at either the rising or setting of the Sun on the local horizon. In the United Kingdom, television and radio broadcasters consider a day as starting and finishing at 6am. The latter is unwittingly the basis of GSPI’s shifting scheme. In contrast, the present common convention denotes the civil day starting at midnight, which is near the time of the lower culmination of the mean Sun on the central meridian of the time zone. Before the year 1925, the old astronomical convention 3 was to refer to noon as zero hours. Humans, with our cultural norms and scientific knowledge, have supplanted Nature with several different conceptions of the day's boundaries. Present common convention is for the civil day to begin at midnight, that is 00:00, and last a full twenty-four hours until the 24:00 (also known as 00:00 of the next day). Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) 4 is primarily based on the Greenwich Mean Astronomical Time (GMT), a term originally referring to mean solar time at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich in England. By international agreement 5 , UTC time is Greenwich Mean Time, although their measurement differs: GMT is measured from noon whereas UTC is measured from midnight. UTC is the legal basis of time anywhere in the world. Furthermore, the 24-hour clock 6 is a convention of time-keeping in which the day runs from midnight to midnight and is divided into 24 hours, numbered from 0 to 23. The United States and Canada are the only industrialized countries left in which a substantial fraction of the population is not yet accustomed to it. The 24-hour notation is also the international standard notation of time (ISO 8601) 7 .

PARADIGM SHIFT

With the advent of the New Year, it is recommended that once–and–for–all GSPI’s shifting schedule should be consistently and uniformly implemented throughout the corporate environment based on ACTUAL real-time dates and time, and not on the VIRTUAL REALITY that each day begins at 0600H (6a.m.) Irrespective whether the first shift is called “A” or any other, real-time should be the basis of each day congruent to the Information Age where computerized digital clocks rule the day. With the use of real-time, in-house software application programmers would no longer be constrained to suit applications to GSPI’s unique shifting scheme; process data would be readily ported to Minitab, the soul of Six Sigma projects; production reports would be somewhat error-free and easily prepared given the ample time between the end of each day to actual report generation; plus it would ensure coil production traceability to delay monitoring, shift logs, quality audit trails and process parameters monitoring, as well as compatibility to the GSPI’s external transactions.

1

Wikipedia (2007) Shift Work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_work

William and Mary Morris (1988). Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. New York: HarperCollins, 1977, 1988. 3 U.S. Naval Observatory (2007). http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/ut.html 4 Galison, Peter. (2003) Einstein's clocks, Poincaré's maps: Empires of time. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. 5 The Swiss Watch Industry (2005) World Clock – Current Local Times. http://www.worldtimeserver.com/ 6 Wikipedia (2007) 24-Hour Clock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock 7 ISO 8601, The International Standard for the representation of dates and times. 2

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