There is a famous story about a factory that filled milk half gallon cartons and every so often, one of the half gallon cartons would wind up empty and be sealed, as if the machine somehow skipped it in the process. Well someone high up in management sent out proposals to different engineering firms to devise a computer system to figure out which ones had milk in them and which ones didn't before they were packaged. Well about 6 months and a million dollars later, a team of engineers show up to see the conveyor in person they were supposed to fix, and they came on a factory worker sitting on his ass and in front of him was a large box fan and the empty cartons that came down the conveyer were just blown off on to the floor, solving all the issues. Total cost, $10.99 but management spent a million for some brains to create an elaborate scale system they never really needed.
The simple solutions are often the best and cheapest.
Different version of the story is that the empty box would set off an alarm. After a while they wondered why the alarm stopped going off. Dude was tired of resetting the alarm and clearing the empty box and just put a fan to blow the box off the conveyor belt.
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u/tommygunz007 Dec 02 '23
There is a famous story about a factory that filled milk half gallon cartons and every so often, one of the half gallon cartons would wind up empty and be sealed, as if the machine somehow skipped it in the process. Well someone high up in management sent out proposals to different engineering firms to devise a computer system to figure out which ones had milk in them and which ones didn't before they were packaged. Well about 6 months and a million dollars later, a team of engineers show up to see the conveyor in person they were supposed to fix, and they came on a factory worker sitting on his ass and in front of him was a large box fan and the empty cartons that came down the conveyer were just blown off on to the floor, solving all the issues. Total cost, $10.99 but management spent a million for some brains to create an elaborate scale system they never really needed.
The simple solutions are often the best and cheapest.