[johnking]

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.”

[javadocmd]

Another 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.

[xchaotic]

Even 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)

[akira2501]

> 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.

[zdkl]

That line of reasoning is what cost them 8M in the first place. If it looks stupid, but works, it ain't stupid.

[drcross]

I dislike this line because life is more nuanced than it portends.

[icelancer]

>>I dislike this line because life is more nuanced than it portends.

Most of the time, it isn't. That's the point.

[zdkl]

Exactly. Hacker news

[rando444]

The 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.

[chrischen]

$8M still seems high for a scale.

[jordanb]

That'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

[rocqua]

100 000 for the scale, 7 900 000 for knowing where to put the scale.

[chrischen]

100,000 still seems high. Clearly I'm in the wrong industry. I should be fleecing enterprise businesses instead.

[firethief]

Let me introduce you to a thing called Java!

[Dylan16807]

Yeah, 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.

[pcurve]

Yes, but $8MM is total project cost = existing full time employee costs, outside consultant cost, and hardware + software.

[justboxing]

Thanks for the excellent TL;DR.

Now if you can turn yourself into a summarization bot....

[Dylan16807]

It's not a summary, just cutting out the commentary.

[khazhoux]

If only there was a word for taking a long article and shortening it, while preserving the main points.

[Dylan16807]

"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]

This 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]

Yeah 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]

The 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.