Post by Santosh Puthran on Oct 22, 2005 22:17:22 GMT
This is GOOD! It’s interesting and an excellent example of out of the box
thinking!!!
One of the most memorable case studies I came across was the case of the empty
soapbox, which happened
in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies.
The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a box of soap that
was empty. It
immediately isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the
packaged boxes of soap to
the delivery department.
For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty. Management
tasked its engineers to
solve the problem.
Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with
high-resolution monitors manned
by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make
sure they were not empty.
No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast.
But a rank-and-file employee that was posed the same problem came out with
another solution. He bought a
strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched
the fan on, and as each
soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.
