Next time you experience a product failure of any sort, think about the story I'm about to tell. I spent a couple years working in a factory making components for some of the best-known automobile brands in America. I was a manufacturing engineer charged with making sure the production lines kept popping out assemblies to ship to car plants all across the land, and to seek improvements that would pop them out faster, preferably requiring fewer humans drawing paychecks. The thinking was that by eliminating people you'd not only cut costs, but would remove a major source of errors in the process. The machines wouldn't neglect vital steps, forget to insert parts or call in sick.
The auto industry at that time was embracing sophisticated automation systems with fool-proof monitoring, and robots were being employed for tasks once considered the domain of sentient beings. They could do repetitive tasks twenty-four hours a day with no breaks for lunch, and do it the exact same way every time. No more missing screws, sloppy welds or misfit doors. The goal was to have a factory that could run "lights out" and not need us mortals for anything.
We were far from that point in the department I was responsible for. People were still doing tasks like loading parts into welding machines, and then unloading them after they had been fused together by enough electricity to run your house for a day. The parts had to be fixtured accurately in order to meet the customer's specs and insure smooth reliable operation for as many years as the vehicle was roadworthy.
Because the assemblies were considered a safety feature of cars and trucks, they were subject to rigorous inspection before being tagged and crated for shipping. The ones that didn't pass muster were tagged as rejects and dumped in a metal bin for later dismantling to salvage any good parts for new assemblies. The reject rate was fairly low, and everyone was happy. Most of the time.
One day when I was on the shop floor watching tradesmen install some new pieces on an old machine, (I wasn't allowed to touch anything, nor wield any tools - union rules) I saw the department foreman waving his arms and talking in a loud angry voice, obviously not a happy man. He was upset because there weren't enough completed mechanisms ready for the factory in Michigan. This could result in an embarrassing and expensive production line stoppage. He was on the hot seat, and he didn't like it. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and he found the solution to his problem sitting right on the floor.
Pointing to some steel baskets containing finished assemblies, he barked, "What the #*&% are these?"
"Rejects," his assistant answered, "Shafts and levers way out of spec. Welder was adjusted wrong. All fixed now." (Thanks to me, by the way.)
With his big foot, the foreman pushed the baskets one-by-one over to the wall where all the good parts were waiting to be loaded on a truck for the trip to Detroit. He told his underling to remove the "Reject" tags from every assembly and send them on their way.
"But, boss," the assistant protested, "Those are bad welds! They'll break or bind up and the wipers will stop dead!"
The foreman wasn't buying. All he knew was that he would make his numbers that week. He bent down to help the assistant pull tags off substandard units while he explained to him how the world works.
"That's what warranties are for."
