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Ohiyo!

Hello again from the Far East on the West Coast, and greetings from the DOJO. This week, before I get in to the nuts and bolts of the treadmills and the ellipticals I work on, I’m going to start with a quick guide to how to choose a treadmill — well, how to choose a residential / home grade treadmill. Choosing a commercial treadmill tends to be a bit easier — go Star Trac, Matrix, Landice or Life Fitness and, in spite of their great ellipticals, avoid Precor treadmills. Precor is a great company, they just don’t quite have treadmills down as well as the other companies. With the commercial treadmills it’s kind of like choosing between a BMW, a Mercedes and a Lexus. It’s all about bells and whistles more than performance…they’re all great machines and we’ll talk about them another time.

Home treadmills are a tough sea to navigate for most buyers — there are so many different brands and they all look alike to outsiders. Luckily, over the past 20 or so years, I’ve had to repair just about every treadmill ever made. In other words, my pain will be your salvation!

My first piece of advice is: avoid anything and everything from Icon Health and Fitness. They’re the manufacturer of the units you’ll find at places like Sears — nothing against Sears, but the treadmills they sell tend to be on the lower end of the quality scale. Their treadmills seem to have specs that are too good to be true for their cost and, truth be told, they are. The old proverb, “you get what you pay for” comes in to play with them. Small motors with high RPMs to give them a perceived higher horsepower (most of their motors should really be rated at under 1.5 HP regardless of what they tell you — a motor the size of a soda can should not be powering a full sized treadmill!), lots of plastic pieces, tiny rollers, and generally unstable machines are par for the course for the Icon brands like Proform, Weslo, Healthrider and Image. Just stay away from them! There are better treadmills even at the more affordable prices that Icon tempts the unlearned consumer with.

On with translating the arcane lore that is treadmill purchasing for the lay person.

Let’s start with the motor. The first thing you want to do is make sure the motor is rated with “Continuous Duty.” Any sales person or manufacturer who gives you a “Peak” rating is trying to sell you a bag of magic beans. Peak is best described as the maximum a motor will perform at before it breaks down. What’s more imporant is: how the heck is that motor going to perform when you’re actually using it? Another thing a shady salesperson might mention is that a common home circuit (120v/15amps) will only let you run about 2.5 HP and any motor larger than that is a waste of money. Technically that is true (about the amps vs. HP, not the waste of money), but the larger motors will tend to last longer as they are not running at the higher RPMs of a smaller motor. And, if nothing else, the larger the motor, the smoother the “ride.” A bigger motor will allow you to run or walk on it without slipping.

The next thing to look at is the size of a treadmill’s rollers. The bigger the rollers, the longer your belt will last and the better the running experience.

Next, and this is my favorite thing — especially when recommending cardio equipment to my in-laws — the warranty. Like anything else, the better the warranty the more piece of mind you will have. The 5 year parts warranty on Spirit treadmills, for example, is one of the best in the business. For me, the more faith a manufacturer has in its own product (i.e. the warranty), the more faith I have in that product. Of course, doing repairs I absolutely love the lower end warranties as it means more paying work for me!

What’s next? The weight and stability of the machine. There is nothing worse than getting on a treadmill and having it move back and forth, or shake, or, even worse, creak as you run on it. The heavier the unit the longer it will last. If you’re used to running on a treadmill at your local gym and then get on most home units, you’ll immediately notice the difference. You don’t want to be running around on something that feels like it is going to fall apart now do you? Don’t answer, that was a rhetorical treadmill question.

The tread and the deck are where most problems for treadmills happen. When the friction from your running builds up between the deck and the tread, the badness begins. Stick with the 4-ply belts/treads that help to reduce the amount of friction, and look at units with reversable, phenolic wax coated decks. Reversable decks let you flip over your running surface to use the opposite side when the original wears down. It’s like having a free second deck if you wear out the first one.

Programs. Don’t be fooled by this. Most people only wind up using 3-4 programs. If the treadmill has 20, that’s cool, but you’ll rarely use them. If you do heart rate training, then heart rate control is great. If not, it’s just an extra you’ll never use…like the clock you’ve never set on your VCR.

Speed and Incline are worth talking about. Most treadmills can go up to about 10 miles per hour and a 10 degree incline. Don’t let speed or incline become a deciding factor unless you’re doing a lot of high speed or high incline training. Obviously, electronically controlled speed and incline are the way to go. If those feature are manual just move on.

Finally, test out the shock absorbtion. You want to make sure you aren’t running on a hard surface. This is a “feel” thing more than a “scientific” one. If the deck is bouncy, move on. If the deck feels like running on concrete, move on. If the deck moves from side to side, move on. You want to find a deck that feels good, with just enough give and little to no lateral motion.

Beyond that fans, speakers, cup holders, magazine racks and even television sets on the treadmill’s console are all just icing on the cake. It’s better to get a good treadmill without a fan or TV and spend $50 to buy your own than to get a crappy, fully loaded treadmill which will eventually just become an expensive coat rack for dirty clothes.

Now, I know I alread typed “finally” but there is one last piece to consider: PRICE. You can only get what you can get but don’t be fooled into buying a lemon. There are decent (and some downright Great) treadmills at just about every price point. I’ll go over some of the best, at least in my experience, treadmills in the under $1000 range in the next week.

Don’t despair, there is a good treadmill out there you can actually afford

If you are lucky enough to own a luxury sport utility vehicle, you might have chosen the BMW X5. Families enjoy the comfort, power and safety that comes equipped in every X5. Its all-wheel drive system can take you wherever you need to go in whatever road conditions the weather dishes up. No matter where you drive, be it to school to drop the kids off, shopping, or on long road trips, one feature of your X5 that is sure to get a lot of use is your car’s outstanding audio system. An important part of that stereo system is the BMW subwoofer. An X5 subwoofer can make your digital audio files shine.

Speakers in a BMW subwoofer consist of several component parts, including the various drivers and crossovers contained in some type of speaker enclosure. There are usually three types of drivers involved, tweeters to pick up the high register frequencies that produce high-pitched sounds, woofers to take on the low frequencies and their resultant low-pitched sounds, and midrange drivers that excel in delivering all of the sound produced by the midrange signals. Crossovers divide the entire electronic signal recorded on your mp3 or CD into narrower frequencies to which the drivers have been designed to respond, so that you will be able to hear the full range of sound that is on the recorded media.

The X5 subwoofer uses drivers whose specialty is delivering the low end of the sound scale, the bass and sub-bass sounds. You attach a subwoofer to your speaker to improve the low bass’s resolution. Some of these sounds are so low that the human ear cannot hear them, but nevertheless humans can actually feel those sounds. You might have noticed this effect the last time you attended a live rock concert with a bassist performing.

These dynamic subwoofers are often installed in the back seat area or trunk of a car, such as your BMW X5. Care needs to be taken when turning the volume up when subwoofers are in action in your vehicle, because hearing loss can result from prolonged exposure at too high a volume.

Some people go for adding tactile transducers to their vehicles as well. When the low bass sounds go down so low that you cannot hear them, you can feel them, and that feeling is sensitized by the use of tactile transducers. They are connected to the seat in the car and the amplifier in the speaker. The sound coming from the driver is carried through the bones of your body and eventually up to your ears.

If you like rock music with a pounding bass line, or classical music that features tympani, then a subwoofer might be in your car stereo’s future.

The concepts behind Lean manufacturing were built on common sense. In his book “Poor Richard’s Almanack”, Benjamin Franklin wrote “He that idly loses 5s. [shillings] worth of time, loses 5s., and might as prudently throw 5s. into the river.” If I read this right what he meant was “if you don’t need it, don’t waste your money on it.”

While it was Henry Ford who took the concept of waste reduction into the manufacturing floor, it was Toyota that concretized the practice into what we now call lean concepts.

Lean manufacturing processes have revolutionized the way many leading enterprises deliver products to their customers and manage their supplier relationships. Over the past few years, the use of Lean techniques has expanded well beyond the automotive industry to delivering dramatic results in other sectors, including aerospace, consumer goods, and industrial equipment, among others.

According to AberdeenGroup, Lean concepts have helped manufacturers streamline processes and reduce cycle times in complex manufacturing and supply chain environments. For example, when applied to product development these same concepts result in increased productivity and potentially the ability to develop more profitable products.

In “The Lean Benchmark Report, Closing the Reality Gap,” Jane Biddle, Vice President of Manufacturing Research, AberdeenGroup, notes that although C-level executives are enthusiastic about the benefits that can be derived from “Leaning out” operations. A large performance gap exists between those companies that are simply using Lean techniques on the shop floor versus those that have built a culture based on Lean thinking.

Lean manufacturing is nothing new. Some of the best run manufacturing businesses in Asia have deployed Lean manufacturing to streamline operations, reduce cost and increase operational efficiency.

Asia awareness levels

Just how familiar are manufacturers with regards to Lean concepts? Large manufacturers with multiple operations spread across different countries understand the concepts well and are in various stages of implementation (bear in mind that in the case of Toyota, adoption of lean concepts is an in-going process).

Ronald Li, Director of Industry and Product Marketing at Infor, says that the level of understanding of what constitutes “Lean” in a manufacturing sense varies by country as well as by type of industry. “Across Asia, companies that have taken the road to ‘lean’ are more likely to pursue this strategy to achieve departmental improvements. In mature countries such as Japan, manufacturers have been practicing lean for many years, especially on the manufacturing floor.

Paul Liddiatt, APAC Program Director for Oracle Commercial Applications concurs and adds his thoughts: “The application of Lean manufacturing principles to the entire supply chain is now being seen as the imperative in order to deliver the responsiveness customers require while still keeping a tight reign on costs. Once Lean manufacturing techniques are understood they are seen as the key to eliminating waste in all its forms from the supply chain. Without the burden of waste, the supply chain delivers significant competitive advantage.”

Methodologies vary

As something based on common sense, Lean implementations can come in the form of pencil and paper or entries in a spreadsheet. While workable, these are neither scalable nor sustainable. Companies that have progressed far advanced in implementing lean are likely to depend on systems that take a more holistic approach to support lean deployments.

As companies begin to extend Lean concepts across departments, integrated business applications suites are being seen as helping them to manage information more efficiently.

“These applications rely on a single, integrated source of data to connect disparate business processes, not just within the company and its factory but also throughout its entire supply chain. This may comprise multiple contract manufacturers. When users make a change to one application, every other application is notified, initiating related workflow processes automatically,” said Liddiatt.

ERP vendors have also introduced “enablers” that adapt their applications to a Lean environment, with inherent support for Kanban control, product configurators, and just-in-time materials procurement. This level of integration allows companies to compress the manufacturing process and streamline production, reducing the time for the whole order-to-delivery cycle.

Liddiatt cautions that ERP applications are just management tools that support the operations of a manufacturing plant. An ERP package helps users use information more wisely, eliminate non-value-adding activities and streamline core business processes. “To successfully implement Lean manufacturing concepts, appropriate training and resources need to be invested so users embrace the principles of Lean,” adds Liddiatt.

Lean initiatives, fat benefits

At the end of the day, companies deploy Lean initiatives because they want to save money. Call it ‘cost cutting’ or ‘waste elimination’ or ’saving pennies’ the end goal is the same: eliminate what is not necessary to get the job done and deliver the promised goods.

Biddle surmises that for companies willing to make the commitment, Lean pays dividends in both the short and long term. Successful Lean implementations have met and exceeded the performance expectations of 80 percent of best-in-class companies in areas such as customer service and supply chain flexibility.

“In many cases, technology solutions are enabling best-in-class companies to outperform their competitors by continuously measuring, monitoring, and responding to key production metrics in real-time. Additionally, ERP, Lean Specialty/MES, and homegrown solutions provide the foundation from which companies are enshrining value streams, improving productivity, preparing for new product launches, and driving culture change throughout the company and supplier base,” adds Biddle.

Role of technology

Many Lean initiatives start on paper. Over time these “technology-less” implementations become impractical for a number of reasons. According to Biddle, customer expectations continue to escalate, driving the need for additional variations to existing products, faster launches for new products, and decreased order cycle times; this requires increased flexibility in existing plants, with suppliers, and across the supply chain.

Pricing pressures have driven many manufacturers to outsource production, which has resulted in a lack of visibility into foreign operations; this is driving the need for web-based solutions that enable decision makers to see and control key operations remotely.

Finally, leading companies are scaling and extending their Lean processes beyond a single plant to encompass supply chain partner processes; this is driving the need for a technology infrastructure that facilitates the design and implementation of customer-focused business processes.

Lean technology solutions can provide a solid foundation from which manufacturers can manage Lean transactions across core value streams that extend from the customer, through production, and back to the supplier.

Lean solutions should support Toyota Production Systems (not because you work for Toyota) by dynamically managing key control points, scheduling and tracking critical resources, and promoting continuous improvement programs. In addition to managing transactions, solution technologies should facilitate the capture of standardized processes and value stream operating models.

Finally, Lean solutions should support the principles espoused in the ‘Toyota Way’ by embracing common language, promoting a shared understanding, providing tools that enable collaboration, and institutionalizing a culture of Lean for the long term.

Lean challenges persists

AberdeenGroup warns th
at for any manufacturer, transitioning from a traditional to a Lean manufacturing environment is a major change for many reasons. A significant cultural change needs to happen. It may be business as usual but certainly the way to go about business as usual will not be the same. People need to be willing to change the way they do things and that process of change is where much of the challenge lies.

Another challenge will be a persistent and firm commitment from senior management. Lean will mean a company’s long-term vision and senior management must not be distracted by short-term concerns when Lean initiatives are concerned.

Lean manufacturing goes against the grain of many manufacturing traditions. The old measures of success of efficiency and utilization need to be replaced with agility, lead-time, inventory turns and quality across the board.

Liddiatt warns that an upheaval inherent in Lean programs means that the engagement of senior management is required for successful implementation. “A top-down approach is necessary for adequate resources to be allocated to train employees and change the thinking within the company, and resolve is also necessary to push through reorganization in production processes and inventory management,” adds Liddiatt.

Beyond integrating legacy systems with the new Lean initiative is the necessity of integrating external partners and suppliers into the Lean program.

“Meeting customer requirements for just-in-time deliveries requires the support and cooperation of not only finance and logistics, but also the suppliers who provide the raw materials, components, and assemblies that are used early in the manufacturing process,” Biddle says.

Liddiatt agrees and adds that as Lean principles take hold, innovative companies will realize that they need to involve their suppliers and even their customers to achieve continuous improvement. “Suppliers should be considered an extension of the company, and the most successful lean companies involve their suppliers in product design in order to improve quality and simplify manufacturing. They work together to improve communication methods and shorten lead times throughout the supply chain,” says Liddiatt.

Manufacturers are constantly on the prowl to weed out waste and inactivity. As Toyota has shown, this is a continuous process with benefits trickling right across the operation. Because Lean concepts cut across functional barriers, it is entirely, some experts actually support the idea, to shift the focus from Lean manufacturing to Lean enterprise.