Trend of Increasing Degree of Flow

Especially in the corporate world, we live in a world of processes. Every step is defined by workflows, forms and best practices. Ideally, seamless solutions of IT systems guide us through every step and provide us a great user experience. Ideally…

In reality, we still observe many processes with loops, waiting times, errors and unfriendly user interfaces. Certain aspects, however, are already very optimized like supply chains for industrial productions like in the automotive sector. Just-in-time is present since decades.

On a more technical level, we speak about flows. They can be industrial processes as seen above, but mean also the flow of materials, energy or humans. Many of them are already optimized, others still have room for improvement.

Can we learn from optimized flows? What is the underlying trend behind them? Can we use the learnings for other activities?

As stated before in several other blog entries, there are several trends that can help us to predict future system development. One of the universal laws, is the “increasing degree of flow”. There are two sub-trends: one says that useful flows are improved and the other one means that the impact of negative flows is reduced. They can be applied to industrial, IT or human processes and flows. 

For the first part, the improvement of useful flows, there is a number of techniques we know from the classical optimization of processes: elimination of bottle necks, creation of bypasses, reduce the number of process steps or the use of a different flow type (e.g. digital instead of paper). Some other options are the increase of conductivity, elimination of gray zones or to allow several flows to use the same channel.

There are several examples. For instance, fiber optics can be used for conducting information with different wavelengths or polarization. This helped to increase to number of information transported in fiber optics. Also, fiber optics can use the same channel as conventional cables to avoid additional construction costs.

 The elimination of gray zones means to eliminate the lack of information. This can be e.g. the break-down times of machines. The possibility to equip machines with sensors or the use of existing sensor data for analysis can help to prevent failures and eliminate the gray zone of unexpected machine maintenance.

Also, the use of resonance gives us additional possibilities, e.g. the vibration of a conveyor belt at the resonance frequency of the particles improves flow.

The next important step is the stopping of negative impacts on a flow:

On a technical level, the flow of heat can be negative. Here, there above mentioned techniques can be inverted: By increasing the number of flow transformations, heat can be stopped. An example is the use of insulators. Also, the conductivity can be reduced for negative impacts, like a sunglass is reducing the intensity of light.

Stagnant zones help to eliminate harmful particles in industrial processes. The flow can also eliminate its negative impact itself if the principle of the vehicle muffler is used. The opposite, the elimination of resonance can be used to reduce shocks like in a car suspension system or hanging bridges.

What can we learn from the trend of increasing degree of flow?

-         Optimized flows are using principles we can use for other processes or flows

-         The principles are universal and can be applied to several problems

-         Even for optimized flows, there are further levels of optimization possible

-         The principles can be applied to a very broad spectrum of flows

So, some guiding questions for optimizing flows are:

-         Are there any gray zones in your processes?

-         How could the conductivity be increased?

-         What are the negative impacts on the outcome? How could they be minimized by using one or several of these principles?

If you have further questions, contact me at www.schaper-tech.com or via personal message.