“Simple” is the best, but where to find it?

Again deviating from last week, today I am going to share a story that reinforced the lesson that my grandfather shared with me. I remember my grandfather as an affectionate figure, who was also very practical. He had lost everything when he moved to India during independence as part of the partition struggle and he spent days and nights to build his life and his family. He worked hard and believed in various great practices. He told me to always look for simple solutions, he said “Simple, the best one!”. He also asked me to learn from people who were actually carrying out the work and learn from experiencing things. Today I am going to share a story that helped me reinforce this belief and also made me realize the importance of involving people who actually work on the ground, when we are looking to solve a problem.

Never lose touch with the “Ground.”

One pharmaceutical company used to manufacture eye drops. They were facing a peculiar problem, some of the medicine boxes were being reported as empty. They examined their manufacturing facilities and found that indeed the production line had some problems and one in a thousand odd box could be empty. They put the best brains on solving the problem and the whole production line design was scrutinized. They realized that the error was too small to fix the line and the cost would be much higher. But they wanted that the empty boxes do not leave the factory, so they decided to implement a system that can detect the empty boxes and eliminate them before they get packed into bigger boxes.

But the production line was mechanized and it was tough to come up with a solution that could detect the empty box on a moving line. It took many experts and a lot of time and cost for them to come with a solution. Part of the final conveyor belt was re-designed to measure weight  and flag an empty box as it was loaded on it, finally coordinating with a robotic arm, that will remove the empty box before it left the conveyor belt.

When they were installing and testing the new conveyor belt, the line supervisor was perplexed and he started laughing. When others asked him what was so funny, he just went ahead and installed a table fan across the production line at a suitable distance so that the empty boxes will just fly off the belt. He had a simple solution already in mind and it would have saved the company a lot of time and effort and cost, had someone just asked him before.

So I wish that you guys keep your feet firmly on ground and talk to the people who execute the work so that you can come up with simple solutions at much lower cost and much quickly.

Stay tuned for more next week.