He Warned Managers to Replace Worn Machine Parts at a Golf Ball Company. They Refused, and It Cost Millions
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There’s a lot of truth in the saying, ‘you’ve got to spend money to make money.’ Because often in order to be profitable, an upfront investment needs to be made first – after all, money is how most companies get off the ground. But there is also another truth in the fact that, in many cases, you also have to spend money to save money. Because as annoying as it might be, a sizeable outlay can lead to a lot more cost-saving in the long run. Just look at the folk installing solar panels, for example. Sure it costs a lot upfront, but the savings through the years easily make that money back, to the point that the homeowner is profiting in the end.
The engineer in this story was given the task of figuring out why a golf ball company was producing so many substandard balls. And after six months’ work, he had a comprehensive answer for his higher-ups. Namely, some of the equipment was sub-par, which was causing all the defects. So of course, he recommended replacing some of that equipment, investing some money to save a lot more. But they didn’t like that one bit.
Read on to find out why.
Equipment too expensive? Wait a few years and pay double instead
A few years ago I worked for a golf ball manufacturer. Big production, millions of balls a month, billions of dollars a year – and yet every decision maker was cheap beyond reason.
Most of our production equipment was from the 60s made by companies that no longer exist. This matters because when it breaks, it’s all slap jobs and jerry rigs.
I worked mostly with the steam presses. Think giant waffle iron, but instead of electricity it uses super heated steam.
Now there’s two parts: the press and the mould (think the waffle pattern part). The press was a ten-tonne monster that had nothing but leaking pipes. The mould are solid 600lb steel plates.
Let’s see what it’s like operating these machines.
Fast forward to my days as a naive technician, and my boss and engineering start complaining about bad product coming from the moulds and tell me to investigate.
Sure no problem – just 20ish presses and 50ish moulds to go through.
Six months later, I have all the data compiled nice neat and colour coded. Surprisingly the presses are fine within 5% of each other – the moulds however, not so fine.
I found that almost 20 of them had serious deformation issues (40% of total molds) from repeated heating/cooling cycles.
Read on to find out how the bosses reacted to this data.
Present the data and get the big question “what do we do?” I look at them and state the obvious: buy new moulds, you can’t fix them and they won’t magically get better.
Makes sense right? Tool breaks or warps buy a new one. Well they all started crying about prices how new moulds were $22k each, and it would cost nearly half a million to replace them.
So what did they decide after ignoring my input? Let’s try everything else – and I obliged smiling the entire time.
New cavities, press rebuilds, limiting what moulds go where, limiting product runs to specific presses, changing moulds more frequently.
Of course, this only led to things getting worse.
The list goes on and I watched as the problem continued and the bill stacked up. The result is about $200k wasted and a lot of production missed or destroyed. Total loss probably close to 1million from cost and product waste.
Eventually the meeting comes. We need to buy new moulds. I smirk the entire time.
They get the quote and because of a certain tariff/trade war from a certain president, the molds are no longer 22k. They are now 45k. So instead of half a million to re-kit the production floor we had to spend nearly 1 million.
Drained the entire production budget for two years as I sat smiling. I left shortly after. From some friends who still work there told me several people got fired and replaced due to this.
Yikes! It just goes to show that the folks in higher-up positions aren’t always the best placed to be there.
Because this guy knew exactly what needed to be done.
And if they had just listened to him, the company would have saved a lot of money as a result.
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Read on to see what the Reddit community had to say about this.
This person thought the executives had an important – but simple – lesson to learn.
While others had worked under similar management.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a craft store customer who refuses to take no for an answer when it comes to wrapping his purchases for gifts.
Meanwhile, this Redditor knew what it was like to have to work with such stupid rules.
Honestly, while the higher-ups were clearly trying to save the company from a big up-front cost, their outlay actually turned out to be way more as a result. If they’d just spent the money on the new moulds, sure that would have been a big chunk of money to drop, but the result would have been significantly less wasted product, much less wasted time (and time is money, of course) – and not to mention the fact that the moulds, which they would have always had to buy eventually, would have been half the price as well.
In the end, this one financial decision ended up costing the company a whole lot of money. And how smug this guy must have felt knowing that he’d recommended they buy the new moulds when they were half the price, but had been rebuffed. He patiently waited, following through with all the suggested workarounds that he knew wouldn’t be good enough, until finally one day they conceded. That moment must have been sweet.
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