Post #2238390

@encthenet@flyovercountry.social I recently bought two books by Shigeo Shingō, from the mid-1980s. One of them (Zero Quality Control: Source Inspection and the Poka-Yoke System) consists for a large part of single-page forms explaining factory worker's mistakes causing faulty products, countermeasures taken, the costs involved, and the estimated savings of not shipping faulty products. As I browsed through them, I had a similar realisation: this history isn't just a record of management decisions, or to show off how valuable the quality control is, or how to appreach quality control work, but it is capital. It is know-how that comes with the design of the product. Some of those fixes were as small as "make a little raised lip of metal so that you can't install the switch the wrong way around". But if you'd disassemble the end product and see that bit of metal jut out, you might just think, "huh, that looks useless." A redesign that doesn't also scrutinise all the mistakes that were made is doomed to repeat them.