A toothpaste company had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. this was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing line will tell you how difficult is to have everything happen with the time so precise that every single unit comes out of it is perfect 100% of the time. small variations in the environment (which can't be controlled in a cost-effective fashion ) means you must have quality assurance checks smartly distributed across the line so that the customer all the way down the supermarket dont get pissed off and buy someone else product instead.

Understanding how important that was, the CEO of the toothpaste company factory got the top people in the company together and they decided to start a new project, in which they would hire an external engineering company to solve the empty boxes problem, as their engineering deparment was already too streached to take on any extra effort.

The project followed the usual process: buget and project sponsor allocated, RPF third-parties selected, and six month ( and $8 milion ) later they had a fantastic solution - ontime, on the budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. the solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weightitng less than it should. the line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.

A while later the ceo decides to have a look at the ROI of the project: amazing results no empty boxes ever shipped out of the factory after the scales were put in the place. very few customer complaints, and they were gaining market share.

"thats some money well spent"- he says, before looking closely at the other statistics in the repeort.

It turns that, the numbers out of defect picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of the production of use. It should have been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. he filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren't picking up any defects, because all the boxes that got to the point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travelled down tho the factory and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feets before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin. "Oh, that- one of the guys put it there "because he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang" says one of the workers.