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How cool is it to make friends at a neighboring company and get all the inside information?

This employee shares how his friends told him about a quality mishap at his neighboring company.

Check out the full story. 

How a tiny cost saving experiment cost a company over £115,000 of whiskey

So this happened a few years ago at a company which I didn’t work at, but I worked next to. I spoke with the factory staff mostly during coffee breaks in the communal loading bay.

He explains what the company did…

The company manufactured various ceramics, from plates and mugs to more specialty orders like whiskey bottles and commemorative plaques.

They had been in talks with a BIG whiskey company in Scotland for several months to manufacture 250,000 ceramic whiskey bottles over the next 5 years.

I regularly chatted with the guys from the factory floor and some of them had been in the ceramic industry since they’d left school and what they didn’t know about ceramics wasn’t worth knowing.

This is where things get tricky…

Anyway, after the whiskey company was satisfied that they could handle the volume of over 1,000 bottles a week, and their quality standards, the final hurdle came down to the price.

I don’t know the exact numbers, but they ended up arguing over ‘a few pence’ on each one.

Eventually, the order came through and the first batch went into production, but the guys on the factory floor weren’t happy.

They explained to me that in order to make the ‘slip’ (the ceramic liquid) cheaper, they were told to use less of one expensive ingredient and substitute it with something cheaper.

The whiskey company was completely aware of this change, as this was all part of the cost saving measure. The mold for the whiskey bottle was thickened to compensate for the slightly weaker ceramic ‘slip’.

UH OH…

So the first 1,000 bottles were delivered to the customer successfully and the bottling process began.

Meanwhile, the ceramics factory ramped up production to around 1,200 a week in order to maintain an overstock to ensure they wouldn’t incur a penalty should delivery deadlines be missed due to potential production or supply issues.

Again, the factory staff weren’t entirely happy with the product quality, but they were very pleased with the practically unlimited overtime they could pick up.

About a month passes and I hear some awful news from one of the factory staff.

The whiskey company completed their first bottling operation using the new ceramic bottles, but once they’d been filled up and moved around with a fork lift truck, the bottoms were breaking open on practically every single one. Worse still, this was only discovered after all 1,000 had been filled with whiskey.

That’s INSANE!

Production of the bottles was immediately stopped so that the cause of the problem could be determined. They even went as far as sending the bottles to be X-rayed to check their structural integrity.

Eventually, it was discovered that even though the thickness of the ceramic had been increased, this wasn’t enough to stop the bottom from ‘falling out’ after it was filled with whiskey and then moved with a fork lift truck once it was boxed and palletized.

So these were expensive bottles of whiskey which would go on to retail for over £100 a bottle, and practically all of the 1,000 bottles from the first bottling were now leaking their precious contents across the whiskey warehouse!

That sounds so bad!

The following week, two large skips (dumpsters) arrived at the ceramics factory and the staff were ordered to smash and dump every single one of the 2,500 whiskey bottles which were still in the factory in various stages of production.

Some were unglazed and straight out of the molds, and others were completed with glaze, artwork and stickers.

I went outside, purely out of morbid curiosity, to see pallet after pallet of empty whiskey bottles being taken outside and each one smashed by hand with a hammer into the skip.

I saw first hand what had gone wrong with the bottles. The finished bottle looked flawless, but even the gentlest tap with a hammer and the whole bottom just fell out as if it was made of egg shell.

He knew the quality was bad!

I know that hitting a ceramic bottle with a hammer sounds like a harsh test, but these were thick, heavy ceramic bottles which weighed about 2 pounds when they were empty!

And yet the bottom of each one shattered like a thick egg shell.

A few days later, production on the whiskey bottles started again using the original (slightly more expensive) design. I was told that the product liability insurance claim was in the region of £115,000.

Most of this was paid to the whiskey company for the lost whiskey, but some was being paid to the ceramics company for the raw cost of the lost materials they’d had to dump in the skip.

He knows everybody learned a big lesson that day!

The lesson here is not to be clever and try to save a few pennies on a vessel which will hold £100 worth of whiskey!

WOW! That sounds like a huge loss!

Why would the company compromise on something so integral?

Let’s find out how folks on Reddit reacted to this one.

This user doesn’t understand the costing of these bottles in the UK.

This user knows that the lesson is to always test the product!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who received a work email from a place she never even applied.

This user knows what the cost breakdown is.

This user is sad because of all the wasted alcohol.

Somebody found an entertaining story at work!