Does that make it any less stupid?

In a few minutes I got a reply, with an “Incident Number” that said they would, but I would have to call in the order to the 800 number.”

The “Incident Number” was probably just an internal tracking number for the email responding customer service department- not any of the company sales functions.

Remember that “sales” functions do not typically equal “customer service.”

You probably would also gotten an “incident number” if you had emailed to complain about the store’s parking lot having too much litter.

A silly company at which I worked had a vacuum form process to make a component part that went into but was unrelated to the final end product manufacturing processes.

The vacuum form area took up vital production floor space plus had a plastic re-grinder for the trimmings. The component part was simple enough for any outside vacuum form shop to make, it was made from standard black sheet, and the part didn’t even have to be stored inside or delicately handled.

When I recommended to outsource the vacuum form part and process, I was told that the real profits were made in reselling the totes of black regrind to the plastics industry since each tote was 500lbs plus of virgin black material.

In other words, there was such great profit in the reground trimmings that no one in management wanted to let it go. However when I suggested the same idea in regards to recovering corrugated cardboard for resale and not landfilling the cardboard, management said that this was too difficult – ie: not enough profit.

The question is “When are you going to make up the lost production?”
You have two choices.
1) Overtime.
2) During the regular shift.

If you choose (2) then you have to run some over speed so you have some time before the shift ends.

The ratio of the “pure” takt time vs. your effective takt gives you a metric of how effectively you have dealt with variation in work cycles.

I absolutely agree with the “fail small” thing and you’ve heard (and read) my thoughts on it many times. I think there’s one rather big thing in the way though – the “instant gratification / home run / failure is not an option” syndrome that haunts most companies. In support of it, everybody loves a home run or a huge win. They just feel good now don’t they?

On the flip side, this is a habit that gets pretty tough to kick – for all of the reasons I just mentioned. And as we all know, folks that are addicted to something generally have a pretty tough time kicking the habit. Just look at the trouble Europe is going though trying to kick years of easy fix / deficit spending. And most companies are in a pretty similar situation.

So many of us are under the gun to produce huge and instant savings (with no failures allowed) because many before us somehow managed to do just that. The sad truth is that many of those efforts didn’t fail in the short term, but are failing big time in the long term.

BTW, some folks say that I’m cynical when I suggest things like this. I’d prefer to instead think that I’m just annoyingly realistic.

Tom