STOP!!

In the manufacturing industry companies obsessively track and try to reduce defects. The worst kind of these are those that repeat. When you are not making a product, defining defects becomes much more difficult. For families, defective products often take the form of bad purchases. Here again the most damning are those that repeat. The key is to STOP when you are doing something wrong. Let's take a look at what I mean.

This happens all of the time in manufacturing. A machine is making ten defects for every one hundred pieces produced (90% good). It will take two hours of downtime to fix the problem, and the production line will lose fifty pieces of production in that time. A short sighted manager would say keep running it, we cannot afford to lose all of that time. Looking deeper however, we find:

Production rate = 50 pieces / 2 hours = 25 pieces per hour

at 90% good: 25 pieces per hour * .90 * 4 hours = 90 good pieces

if we fix the machine:

at 100% good: 25 pieces per hour * 1.00 * 4 hours = 100 good pieces Thus the production chart for overall production looks like this



The circle in the middle shows that you regain the loss within the first day, and thereafter you keep gaining on where you would have been if you had not fixed the problem.


Now lets look at something more interesting. You join a gym. It's a good idea. You could stand to lose a few pounds, right? I applaud you, but they always sign you up for the automatic draft from your checking account these days. Three months in, you have not been through the gym doors for two weeks. You know that you should cancel the membership, but you let it drag on for another month, then another. It is only $40 bucks a month right? Hey, you might go back, and besides they always hassle you to stay when you try to cancel. You don't have the time to deal with that right now. After a year you have shelled out nearly $500 and still have only your guilt to show for it.

They important thing to note in both of these situations is that however painful it might seem, when something is wrong you should STOP! Nagging problems are far more costly than they at first seem.