The inner dashboard

We were walking through the yard behind the factory when my eye fell on a container. Or actually, on a pile of scrap metal that was in and around it. “What is that?” I asked. “Oh,” said my companion, foreman at the factory, “that’s the scrap of the past week, caused by mistakes in setting up our machines.” I looked at the pile, estimating that it totaled about 1,000 kg of scrapped steel and brass. What a waste, certainly in a time where metal prices are up by 50 to 100 percent compared to a year ago.

We talked a bit more, about setting up machines, and how that works. Step by step, we got to the point where the foreman started seeing that small changes in the factory process could already avoid at least half of the material waste we saw here. The idea of a simple control loop – feedback on one’s actions – does a lot. It’s not impossible to verify if bending wheels, drills or cutters are properly aligned without wasting up to five products in a single production run.