Lucy and her friend Ethel

Lucy and Ethel

 

The following is a narrative of a situation much like Lucy and Ethel and the cake conveyor that was on TV years ago but remains a classic.

 

During the seventies when I was working as a manufacturing engineer, I was assigned to work with another engineer on the installation of a new “stator brushing machine”. I will spare you many of the un-understandable details with the project and just hit the highlights.

 

First of all the other engineer could only get one machine building company to bid on the new machine. Others said it couldn’t be done. Red flag, Red flag!!!! I was tasked with determining the machine cycles, load and unload time and pieces per hour expected, along with cost data.

 

The gist of the operation was as follows.

1. Unload part from machine and load to pre-bake oven conveyor.
2. Load and process next part on brush machine.
3. Unload pre-bake oven conveyor and assemble to final bake oven conveyor.

 

When I compared the machine cycle to the speed of the conveyors I found that the first oven conveyor was cycling faster than the brushing machine and the final bake oven was running slower than the brush machine. This created an impossible bottleneck at the brushing machine. Neither of the conveyor speeds could be changed due to the cure time of the materials involved

 

Needless to say, a meeting was called to resolve the problem. The boss, (who was a Dilbert’s boss look alike), suggested that I change the time allowed to load and unload the machine and ignore the machine cycle. The other engineer nodded his head in agreement with the boss. I sat there with my mouth cycling open and closed but nothing was coming out .The machine, which cost $200,000 dollars never produced a piece and just sat there like the pile of iron that it was.

 

I had another project with the same guy a few years later. This time I took his “projected time” that he and the machine salesman had given me and simply multiplied it by four. He howled like a scalded dog. It turned out that I was 10% low with my estimate. The same boss gave me hell for missing the mark.

 

The factory closed two years later due to inefficiency.