6 ms·
The core of the article (See full version for the extra commentary): A toothpaste factory had a problem. They sometimes shipped empty toothpaste boxes without
by johnking 9y ago
The core of the article (See full version for the extra commentary):
A toothpaste factory had a problem. They sometimes shipped empty toothpaste boxes without the tube inside. This challenged their perceived quality with the buyers and distributors. Understanding how important the relationship with them was, the CEO of the company assembled his top people. They decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem. The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, and third-parties selected. Six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution – on time, on budget, and high quality. Everyone in the project was pleased.
They solved the problem by using a high-tech precision scale that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighed less than it should. The line would stop, someone would walk over, remove the defective box, and then press another button to re-start the line. As a result of the new package monitoring process, no empty boxes were being shipped out of the factory.
With no more customer complaints, the CEO felt the $8 million was well spent. He then reviewed the line statistics report and discovered the number of empty boxes picked up by the scale in the first week was consistent with projections, however, the next three weeks were zero! The estimated rate should have been at least a dozen boxes a day. He had the engineers check the equipment; they verified the report as accurate.
Puzzled, the CEO traveled down to the factory, viewed the part of the line where the precision scale was installed, and observed just ahead of the new $8 million dollar solution sat a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. He asked the line supervisor what that was about.
“Oh, that,” the supervisor replied, “Bert, the kid from maintenance, put it there because he was tired of walking over to restart the line every time the bell rang.”
- chrischen 9y ago$8M still seems high for a scale.
- rocqua 9y ago100 000 for the scale, 7 900 000 for knowing where to put the scale.
- Dylan16807 9y agoYeah, a lot of the lesson seems to (unintentionally) be "don't outsource small things". Even completely ignoring the fan solution, the CEO could have assigned one existing engineering employee to work on it and gotten an $8k system with a non-precision scale.
- jordanb 9y agoThat's because the story is bogus. Weighing products for QA (to make sure there wasn't underfilling) is extremely common. It's called "checkweighing" and you can buy COTS scales to do exactly that. https://doranscales.com/checkweighers/in-motion-checkweigher https://doranscales.com/checkweighers/in-motion-checkweigher
- pcurve 9y agoYes, but $8MM is total project cost = existing full time employee costs, outside consultant cost, and hardware + software.
- xchaotic 9y agoEven if this story was true, neither solution is good as they still have wasted, empty boxes. The solution would be to figure out how the empty ones are produced and fix that (root cause analysis) The scale would be part of the solution to verify the fix (continuous integration)
- zdkl 9y agoThat line of reasoning is what cost them 8M in the first place. If it looks stupid, but works, it ain't stupid.
- rando444 9y agoThe solution is good, but it's not perfect.. it's just a question of how much time and effort particular problems are worth. In fact the whole lesson here is about exactly this.
- akira2501 9y ago> The solution would be to figure out how the empty ones are produced and fix that (root cause analysis) Maybe.. maybe not. One possible outcome: Likely problem: speed of production. Solution: slow down production. Analysis: the loss on sometimes empty boxes is much lower than the loss on a slower production line. Conclusion: the fan is the correct solution.
- justboxing 9y agoThanks for the excellent TL;DR. Now if you can turn yourself into a summarization bot....
- Dylan16807 9y agoIt's not a summary, just cutting out the commentary.
- khazhoux 9y agoIf only there was a word for taking a long article and shortening it, while preserving the main points.
- Dylan16807 9y ago"Here is chapter 2, it's the only chapter you need" is not a summary of a book. A summary is when you pull the relevant points out of the entire document. Especially when the part quoted here was a quote inside the original article. The entire native text of the article was discarded.
- QAPereo 9y agoThis bit of apocrypha is older than me, and never improves. At this point it’s almost part of a the almost religious ideology around some Libertarians.
- jordanb 9y agoYeah lots of variants of it too. I've heard it told in terms of nationalities too "In nation X they built a multi-million dollar sensor, in nation Y they just used a fan." In that format it's similar to the NASA space pens.
- QAPereo 9y agoThe real space pen story is so much more interesting too! Of course the last thing you want in a spacecraft is graphite dust literally “pen testing” every system.
- javadocmd 9y agoAnother way of looking at this story: It took $8 million to take a problem that was only visible to the sales department -- empty boxes are hurting our image! -- and make it visible to the stakeholders who had the right insight to actually fix it -- the people on the production line. That is it cost $8 million to move the pain point to the "right" spot.