It's not often that you catch yourself saying something of moment; and, of course, you should stop everything to write it down, to capture the moment. If somebody else has to remind you of what you said it then the celebrity points earned are reduced by the length of time it takes for it to "click" with you. In a hardware store, recently, I made a comment looking for a part for a bi-fold door that I could not locate in the displays of three different manufacturers of replacement hardware. "Maybe they don't expect this to be a part that needs replacing?"

Have you ever noticed that however many spares you keep at hand that the one you need is not amongst them? That you have every 1% value of resistor across the spectrum, except the one you want now? That the data sheet you have includes every possible characterization in it except for the conditions you are going to use the part under? Whatever is the real cause we are likely to blame Murphy and then move on.

But there often other causes and maybe it is sometimes important to find those reasons to avoid a repeat scenario. You don't always get a chance to see the whole story, but when you do it can be weird, annoying, and maybe a little scary . . .

. . . When I was still a hard-working engineer, fully licensed to carry tweekers and soldering irons, I worked for a while as a systems manager at EMI. While working on a lucrative contract for the Soviet Olympics - for which we were paid long before the invasion of Afghanistan and international boycotts - we needed to come up with a VHF video modulator of high quality but low cost. We eventually designed an extremely nice box that used a SAW filter for the first time in that type of application. The custom work we did with Plessey produced extremely fine results even taking into account the enormous insertion losses of those early parts.

After the contract was fulfilled we received an inquiry for a sizable quantity of the modulators from a Middle East country; when the bill of materials was costed out there was one component not on the shelf: It turned out to be a precision multi-turn pot which had a price tag of about $15 on it. The result of an inquiry to the manufacturer produced the delivery you never want to hear: 52 weeks! We did not, of course, get the business and that effectively put us out of that class of business completely.

But I knew that we had purchased more of those pots than we needed, because it was one of those orders where the last forty or fifty parts were virtually free when you moved on to the next price break. So where had they gone?

This, of course, was well before computer tracking of inventory but I devoted a couple of days to locating the paper trail. It turned out that a bright spark in Cost Accounting had discovered this cache of pots with a $700 value on it with no inventory movement for three months. He issued instructions for the parts to be moved to the company store, a bargain center for unwanted parts. They were all sold there, on the first day they were made available, for the equivalent of a nickel apiece. That netted the company about $2.25, and we lost about $300,000 in orders!

Such was the nature of the decision maker in this loop that there was no possibility of any feedback being either accepted or understood. We did, however, change our ways of doing things: When we brought into house an unusual, or expensive, part that might have delivery problems we made sure they stayed in the lab stock - and never got transferred to manufacturing until they were needed.

Keep looking for the whys, it may save your neck in the future.

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