Rodent Regatta

Yesterday was a very long day. Members of one of our project teams have been working on the shop floor of a small manufacturing operation to determine specific quantities of raw materials consumed in the manufacture of finished goods. All of this is toward the objective of setting up an inventory management and production scheduling system for the client.

Directing the project is one of the family members who owns the business. Documents provided in spreadsheets and notes were supposed to provide the ”facts” about how things get made. Yet, our project team was finding completely different information on the shop floor working with guys who have been making this stuff for 10 to 20 years.

We were faced with the classis example of ”it’s not what you don’t know that hurts your business; it’s what you know that isn’t so.”

Fortunately, after a somewhat detailed presentation of our findings, we were able to convince the fellow who had so much tied up in his own notes and spreadsheets. He agreed that his company would be far better off built around a system of information that was true and accurate rather than information that was intuitive or seat-of-the-pants.

All the spreadsheets in the world couldn’t substitute for a tape measure and a walk through the manufacturing facility to where the raw materials were actually stored. The meeting could have gone either way, but wisdom prevailed.