This reminds of of a story I heard from a speaker about over-engineering:
A toothpaste company had a small rate of faults when producing the product, every couple of thousand tubes produces the machine would put an empty one on the production line, it would then be packaged and shipped, so every now and then a customer would complain he bought an empty toothpaste.
The company decided to fix that, hired a couple of consultants, and after a dozen of engineers looked into the problem for a couple of months and burned a couple of millions in research they came up with a brilliant solution.
before packaging the toothpaste, they added a very sensitive balance to the production line, every toothpaste would pass there, if the balance detected a difference in the expected wight it would pause the line, then a mechanical arm would push it out, go back to the resting place and continue the line.
After implementing the solution the managers waited a couple of months to see the results and compare numbers, to see how efficient the new solution was. It was amazing! 100%. not one complaint of empty tubes after the expensive solution was implemented. The board was so satisfied with the investment that they came to the production floor for a tour on the new QA perfect tool. But it was turned off.
They called the floor manager and asked what happened, they couldn't turn off that important piece of the production line, they could have all the complaints back.
The floor manager said he doesn't even remember how to turn it on, he said, I turned it off shortly after the put this thing here.
So how it is possible they have 0 complaints with if not because of the new tool?
The floor manager said it was slowing down production, every now and then it would completely stop the whole production line, so he turned it off and bought a fan, pointed out to the stop, the fan would be string enough to push any empty toothpaste case.
That's a fun story told often around a most factories. I've also heard it told that instead of a mechanical arm the operator would have to stand up, walk over, remove the box, and go sit back down. Since the guy was a little lazy he just put a fan there. The moral of that story was "ask the laziest guy how to fix your problem and he'll give you a good answer".
It's a dangerous methodology to preach though. In this story they found out that they had a problem where they were producing boxes without product and instead of actually figuring out why they were producing empty boxes in the first place (i.e. determining the root cause of the problem) they over engineered a 100% quality control inspection on every piece at a huge expense.
In any manufacturing process you reach a point of diminishing returns where it becomes simply more cost-effective to reject an occasional defective product than to solve the root problem causing the defects.
A toothpaste company had a small rate of faults when producing the product, every couple of thousand tubes produces the machine would put an empty one on the production line, it would then be packaged and shipped, so every now and then a customer would complain he bought an empty toothpaste.
The company decided to fix that, hired a couple of consultants, and after a dozen of engineers looked into the problem for a couple of months and burned a couple of millions in research they came up with a brilliant solution.
before packaging the toothpaste, they added a very sensitive balance to the production line, every toothpaste would pass there, if the balance detected a difference in the expected wight it would pause the line, then a mechanical arm would push it out, go back to the resting place and continue the line.
After implementing the solution the managers waited a couple of months to see the results and compare numbers, to see how efficient the new solution was. It was amazing! 100%. not one complaint of empty tubes after the expensive solution was implemented. The board was so satisfied with the investment that they came to the production floor for a tour on the new QA perfect tool. But it was turned off. They called the floor manager and asked what happened, they couldn't turn off that important piece of the production line, they could have all the complaints back. The floor manager said he doesn't even remember how to turn it on, he said, I turned it off shortly after the put this thing here.
So how it is possible they have 0 complaints with if not because of the new tool? The floor manager said it was slowing down production, every now and then it would completely stop the whole production line, so he turned it off and bought a fan, pointed out to the stop, the fan would be string enough to push any empty toothpaste case.