Solution for Empty Boxes

Once a toothpaste factory had a problem with its packaging and because of packaging problem some empty boxes were shipped without tube inside.

Production line designing engineers knew it was quiet difficult to have exact precision of packing tube into pack with perfection every time. They also knew it was very necessary to sort out this problem so that people buying product don’t get frustrated.

CEO new that unsatisfied customers may lead to lower market value of product in market and company will face huge loss. So her gather all engineers from all departments and after all discussion they decided to hire external engineering company to solve this problem of empty boxes.

After spending a huge amount and 6 months time the problem was solved. A high-tech precision scale was installed on production line. Once the boxes are filled with tube then it would be sent on that precision scale and would sound a bell and flash light whenever a box weighted less than required weight.

Process was like when ever scale rang bell because of empty box then line would stop and someone had to go over there and move the defective box off the line and then press start button to restart the line.

Few days after installing that precision scale, CEO decided to take a look on how it was going as he wanted to know if it was good enough. Scale was working fine and it was detecting empty boxes perfectly and now even market share were gaining.

After sometime again when he reviewed about working of production line he found out that number of defected boxes picked by that scale were zero.

Previously it would pick at least a dozen defected boxes per week but now it was zero. He thought that there must be some mistake with report. He filed a report for bug in that scale and asked engineers to check.

After some investigation engineers reported that the statistics were indeed correct and scale was not picking defects because all the boxes that got to scale were good.

Perplexed, CEO went to factory and walked to part of production line where scale was installed. He saw that there was a desk fan placed just few feet before the place where scale was installed and that desk fan was blowing off all the empty boxes into the bin. Curious he asked workers around about that.

One of the worker stated, “Oh that, it was placed by that guy who had to keep check on that scale and start line again because of which he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang..!!”

Moral:
Every Problem have Solution but Because of always Thinking in particular way, We sometimes are not able to See around that Problem and Think of Easier and Better Solution.