Professor Elam

EV Update frm WSJ

Thursday May 4 2023

 

In January 2021, its pickup prototype burned during testing. As it burned through cash, Lordstown sold its namesake plant and contracted assembly to Foxconn Technology Group. Last November Foxconn agreed to invest $170 million in Lordstown, perhaps hoping that Inflation Reduction Act subsidies would provide a boost.

Yet Lordstown had manufactured only 31 vehicles by late February 2023—most of which had to be recalled. Losing patience, Foxconn on April 21 threatened to withdraw its investment, triggering Lordstown’s bankruptcy warning.

As interest rates have normalized, companies with little revenue are struggling to borrow and raise fresh capital. This is one reason stocks of other EV startups have crashed from their pandemic highs, including Canoo (down 96%), Nikola (99%), Faraday Future Intelligent Electric (99%), Rivian (90%), Lucid (87%) and Fisker (81%).

Arnold S on becoming a Champion

Tuesday April 25 2023

Click here for motivational speech

 

and here is another

 

Yeah I know I do not look like that either

 

But in  1975 I had a goal, pass the cpa exam, no one thought I could do that, in  1999

another goal I wanted to be a college professor, same thing

 

I did both and have since won national, state, and local wards

 

If you do not have a goal, most any plan will get you there

 

If  you think you can

Or if you think you can't

you are probably right

 

both of these guys were a fabulous success, but no one thought they could do it

everything is impossible until someone does it

Nelson Mandella

 

Danny DeVito

Don Knotts

Arnold S.

 

DeVito and Michael Douglas were in acting class together, go figure

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bed Bath Beyond is Chapter 11

Monday  April 24 2023

 

Chapter 11 is re organization is there anything left to re organize if they are going to close all the stores?

This illustrates the danger of making one big change across the entire organization.

 

From $50 to zilch in less than three years.  The new CEO dropped all name brand merchandise from the stores,  Throw in covid absence of shoppers, debt and ka boom no more BBBY.

The same thing nearly happened to J C Penny. They let a new hire from Apple attempt to change all the stores at once. Apple sold about 20 items while JCP sold thousands, it nearly broke the chain. THey should have test marketed it i \t  in a half dozen stores.

Japanese manufacturers have a phrase, kaizen. While it means continuous improvement it also implies making small  not large changes all at once. In 5327 we discussed Deming's Total Quality Mangement philosophy last week.  This is an extension of that same idea.

 

Example - the Toyota Camry mid size sedan was their best seller. Not it iw the Toyota RAV 4, a mid sized SUV. I drive a  2009.  If you park mine beside a  20223, you can see they removed the full sized spre from the back door.Other wise it is remarkably similar, don't mess with success.

 

______________________

Kaizen (Japanese: 改善, "improvement") is a concept referring to business activities that continuously improve all functions and involve all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. Kaizen also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain.^[1] It has been applied in healthcare,^[2] psychotherapy,^[3] life coaching, government, and banking.

By improving standardized programs and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste and redundancies (lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first practiced in Japanese businesses after World War II, influenced in part by American business and quality-management teachers, and most notably as part of The Toyota Way. It has since spread throughout the world and has been applied to environments outside of business and productivity.^[4]

Overview

The Japanese word kaizen means 'change for better' (from 改 kai - change, revision; and 善 zen - virtue, goodness) with the inherent meaning of either 'continuous' or 'philosophy' in Japanese dictionaries and in everyday use. The word refers to any improvement, one-time or continuous, large or small, in the same sense as the English word improvement.^[5] However, given the common practice in Japan of labeling industrial or business improvement techniques with the word kaizen, particularly the practices spearheaded by Toyota, the word kaizen in English is typically applied to measures for implementing continuous improvement, especially those with a "Japanese philosophy". The discussion below focuses on such interpretations of the word, as frequently used in the context of modern management discussions. Two kaizen approaches have been distinguished:^[6]

 

 

Disney Loses on Streaming Lays Off 7,000

Thursday Feb 9 2023

Even mighty Disney makes mistakes.

 

Disney’s streaming service, “Disney+,” lost 2.4 million subscribers and the company announced a massive restructuring, an earnings report released on Wednesday revealed.

The company claims their streaming service, which launched in 2019, lost 2.4 million subscribers. This total is not as severe as some analysts expected, as the streamer recently raised the price of its monthly subscription from $7.99 to $10.99, and were expected to lose more than three million subscribers, according to CNBC.

Disney also announced a massive restructuring which will seek to cut $5.5 billion in expenses and will result in 7,000 employee layoffs, Variety reported. The restructuring will reorganize Disney into three lanes: Entertainment, ESPN, and Parks, Experiences, and Products.

Best Management Video Ever

Tuesday July 25 2022

I ran across Ethan From explaining why he was selling his Ferrari.  After watching the Ferrari video, what I and you would really want to know is what does this buy do for a living?

Here is the answer, 24 minutes and well worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rojTqGUAp6Q

Here is his introduction video, be sure to observe his 'Closet' at the 26 second point, reminds me of Nick Cage closet in Family Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG4JBf0oxck

How Tesla builds a car from Scratch in Five Days

Thursday Feb 18 2021

 

Just a few years back 20 days was the gold standard for building a car, now Tesla does it in 5.

Low interest rates and higher minimum wages guarantee more robotics, watch this five minute video.

www.youtube.com/embed/8_lfxPI5ObM?rel=

 

The Minard System

Thursday Sept 12, 2019

Today's selection -- from The Minard System by Sandra Rendgen.

In an age when the use and importance of data and statistics were first emerging, Charles Joseph Minard (1781-1870) pioneered the use of visuals to portray that data. His most famous chart, published in 1869 and revered by those in his field, shows Napoleon's army of 422,000 soldiers marching to Moscow and returning as a decimated force of only 10,000: "This work has stood out from Minard's extensive oeuvre for a long time and continues to do so today. Its fame has even produced some curious momentos, such as a T-shirt feauturing [it]. ... Much of this selective fame can be traced back to the enthusiastic praise that the American statistician and political scientist Edward Tufte (b. 1942) bestowed on this graphic. He reasoned that 'it may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn,' and published a facsimile of it. ... "The source of Minard's prevail­ing fame [is] his flow map relating to Napo­leon's Russian Campaign in 1812-1813 [below]. It is puzzling that it is so often shown as an isolated work when it actu­ally forms part of a comparison with a second flow map, which covers the 218 BC march of Carthagian commander Hannibal who, along with an army of ninety thousand men, crossed over the Alps toward Rome. The two maps show the 'progressive losses in men' that both armies suffered. The flows are construct­ed to the same scale. It is important to note that both campaigns consisted of countless separate movements and were interrupted by battles, overnight stays, retreats and advances, and the parting and reunion of troops. To show both campaigns as a constant flow is 'an effective generalization of a historic event.' "The Napoleon graphic manages to integrate six data variables in a con­densed representation devoid of visual clutter. Its base map is strikingly reduced -- except for a few rivers, barely any landscape features are delineated. The westernmost point is the city of Kowno (Kaunas, in what is today Lithuania) on the river Neman. In the east the city of Moscow is the extreme point of the flow. Note that the place names are neither consistently local nor taken from any par­ticular language but switch from French to German to Slavic. The flow enters Russia from Poland with 422,000 men; the retreating army crosses the Neman with only 10,000 men remaining. The graphic is enhanced by a temperature diagram (referring to the Réaumur scale) connected to the retreating flow. Contrary to conventional line diagrams, this one has the time running from right to left in order to follow the westward retreat. "A notable 'narrative' label on the lower left-hand side of the map reads, 'The Cossacks gallop over the frozen Neman.' This isolated test is connected to a spot on the Neman, located in the brown flow entering Russia. However, as we speak of Cossacks and the frozen river, the label can only refer to Russian soldiers chasing the retreating French army in the winter. We may assume then, that Minard here -- in an interesting impulse to complete the 'narrative' contained in the map -- 'told' the end of the story with an anecdote from the retreat and linked it to a particular location on the river.

Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. The graphic is notable for its representation in two dimensions of six types of data: the number of Napoleon's troops; distance; temperature; the latitude and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates.

"In the text Minard listed the books from which he had extracted his data. This must have been a rather laborious process, given that 'the army' consisted of countless military units from many parts of Europe,' "In comparison, the Hannibal base map is more detailed. It emphasizes the coastlines of Spain, southern France, and Italy, and includes the mountain ranges of the Pyrenees and the Alps, both of which formed fatal barriers for Hannibal's army. Note that the region is rotated eastward to make the coast­line fit the horizontal format. The scale along the bottom refers to leagues, an ancient unit of length. Due to the consistent scaling in both maps -- as be­fore, this was a priority for Minard -- Hannibal's losses seem rather modest. He had, however, lost some sixty-eight thousand men in this march, amounting to 72 percent of his troops. "Minard based his representationon the ancient account in Polybius's Histories, as well as some advice from contemporary historians. The map arrestingly conveys a sense of the fatal moments of the campaign. When Hanni­bal approached the Alps, he had forty-­six thousand soldiers at his command­ meaning that forty-eight thousand sol­diers had already been lost. For instance, the crossing of the river Ebro (today in Spain) had resulted in fourteen thousand losses, and the Pyrenees, twenty thou­sand. Losses were due not only to natural obstacles such as rivers and mountains, but also to numerous unexpected battles against local tribes along the way. "This gruesome impression is deeply intensified by looking at the diminishing flow that visualizes Napoleon's army in Russia. To this day, it is an excruciat­ing exercise to read eyewitness reports by soldiers who survived the retreat. Minard created his visualization more than fifty years after the campaign. It is a brilliant conceptual transfer: in apply­ing the flow method to a military cam­paign, Minard shifts his entire focus to a single variable: the number of people in the flow. This variable sees only one type of variation -- a sharp and steady decline. It seems to have been this potent and poignant message that made these two maps (and particularly the Napoleon one) so successful in telling a story about the cataclysm of war."

How the One Percent Live

Labor Day Weekend Sept  2 2019

Rumor has it this guy iis from Midland, must have sold when oil was over $100

https://www.zillow.com/homes/2666-Kings-Rd-San-Angelo,-TX,-76904_rb/75316970_zpid/?

 

 

 

 

Tesla Could Learn from Apple

Monday Jan 28 2019

 

An article in the WSJ suggests Tesla could learn from Apple.  Steve Jobs tried manufacturing only to close the plant. Now Apple outsources manufacturing to a third party.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-should-pull-an-apple-leave-production-hell-to-other-people-11548435605

 

Why not do the same for Tesla?  Tesla has not met its goals for the lower priced model production. GM is closing its Ohio Cruze plant, Why not  unleash GM on the problem?

 

Sounds reasonable to me!

 

Introducing Power B I (Business Intelligence)

Friday January 11, 2019

 

This week I interviewed Lawrence Coffee and Mike Lovelace at the Aventine Hill office in San Antonio both of whom introduced Power BI – an impactful tool to visualize the metrics that drive your organizations strategic objectives. Lawrence is the Senior Manger of Business Intelligence (BI) and Mike, as a CFO advisor provides executive advisory services for needs surrounding the Chief Financial Officer position.

 

Where does your organization fall in the BI and Data Analytics maturity progression? In our interview, this maturity progression was likened by Mike to the human process of crawl, stagger, walk, and finally run. In the beginning your organization is focused on what happened and why did it happen. According to Lawrence, these are forms of descriptive and diagnostic analytics, though commonly known as BI. As organizations mature – they will start focusing on what will happen, which is Predictive analytics, though frequently referred to as Advanced Analytics or Data Analytics. Further along in the maturity cycle organizations begin to focus on ways to make it happen, which is known as Prescriptive analytics, or AI.

 

Power BI is a Microsoft product, which was originally bundled with SQL Server 2012 as a more advanced BI visualization tool for SQL Server data. In 2013 it was launched as an Excel add-on in September 2013. In July 2015 a stand-alone product ‘Power BI’ was launched by Microsoft – built off the prior Excel add-ons Power Query, Power Pivot and Power view. The tool is powerful data visualizations platform for all your organizations metrics. This product enables you to create interactive dashboards, reports and alerting capabilities, which can be consumed on any device (Desktop, tablets and mobile phones). You can ‘Slice’ data to filter the view of your report. This and other interactive features provides real-time monitoring capabilities of your organizations performance to get ahead of issues and/ or your competition. Spot trends on the fly and identify issues or opportunities before impact.

Both mentioned the Gartner magic quadrant report, which reminded me of Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard shows four dimensions of firm success in different areas. Likewise, the Gartner quadrant shows multiple measures on the same page. The three current magic quadrant leaders for Business Intelligence tools are Tableau, Power BI and Qlikview. Amazingly, though Power BI was just launched in 2015, according to research by Robert Walters it enjoys a 51% share of the market as compared to Tableau’s 20% and Qlikview’s 14%. Oracle and SAP have in house products performing similar functions and have a combined 15% share.

 

Given any data set one might then say that Power BI allows one to extract, transform, and then load (ETL) your data into a more automated manner, which allows you to keep your data refreshed on a cadence you need to get the data when and where you need it. 

In summary, Power BI displays Key Performance Indicators (KPI) in ways not easily possible prior to this software. This is important, as accountants seek ways to better turn data into information for their audience. Of note, the price of Power BI is markedly lower as compared to the older BI platforms is competes with.

Lawrence and Mike joined me in this audio summary of our discussion.

Power BI is all about data visualization. It produces dashboards and metrics  by translating data into easy to understand information.

 

190109_0057S12

 

Extra Bonus

 

Check out this article by Lawrence on Creating a Dashboard in Power Point