It was a dark and stormy night and the Cap’n said to the Bosun, “Bosun tell us a story!” So the Bosun began.

Long long ago (about 14 days) the Salesman said to the Client “we can repack that powder for you, it looks pretty straight forward, we should be able to pack a three tonnes in a day but if you want to use soluble bags we recommend that we pack the soluble bags in an outer polythene bag to keep the moisture out”, and the Client agreed.

The Client was unusually keen for the job to start and delivered all of the material for repacking plus the soluble bags and boxes to put it in by the Thursday and paid by the following day and asked if he could pick up the product the following Monday. The Salesman thought that the Client would wait for it to fit into the production plan (which was quite busy, being February). The Client kept ringing up to find out when the product would be ready.

Meanwhile the Technical Man had to set up the paperwork for the job to define all of the components and the production procedure and ensure that the business system would be able to account for it all and the Production Men would know what to do. All in accordance with the ISO 9002, oh best beloved.

Things didn’t go well at the preparation stage when the Mechanical Genius tried to set a machine to hold the soluble bag and allow a controlled flow of powder into the bag so just the right weight landed in the bag which could then be sealed closed. First the bag was a size that meant a new set of jaws had to be made to grip the bag and hold it open. Then the powder proved to be one of those that either flow like water or just sit there looking at you in the hopper. It was obviously necessary to move to a different filling line but that was occupied for a couple of days. The Client kept ringing up to find out when the product would be ready.

Eventually it was possible to move to a new line where there was a rotary valve to control the water-like flow and a hopper vibratory station to get the powder to flow when it was stuck. The trouble was that the vibration tended to separate the heavier particles in the powder from the lighter ones so that the “weight in flight” was variable and so the filling weight control became difficult and much “topping up” was required. A lot of dust got on the floor but filling was now possible and the Production Men gritted their teeth to get the job done. The Client kept ringing up to find out when the product would be ready and then demanded that a tonne of the powder be returned to Southampton overnight so that he could go back to his bucket and spade method to keep his customer happy.

In the first proper day of filling the Production Men found that some of the bags supplied by the Client had holes in them or the bottoms hadn’t been sealed. More dust was spilled and the Production Men gritted their teeth harder. They managed a little over half a tonne on this first day.

The next day dawned and the inevitable climb up the learning curve meant that the Production Men achieved an above target output of 1.2 tonnes. The end was in sight. The job finished the following morning, Friday, and the clean-up was concluded by lunch time. Five pallets of product were sitting there wrapped and ready to go. The yield was a creditable 97% and the client said he would arrange to collect the pallets on Monday. The two tonne job had taken three days, two men and considerable amount of the Mechanical Genius’s time. The business benefits, it was agreed, would all be “strategic”.

The Technical Man told his wife all about it that night in bed and it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any of the Production Men using the polythene bags that would be so useful to protect the soluble bags from moisture. He had a bad night worrying that he might have forgotten to mention this in the production instructions, so after breakfast he checked and to his relief he found that he had included them in the instructions. He telephoned the factory to ask the Production Men working there if they would just take a look at one of the boxes on the pallet to confirm that his instructions had been followed. The bad news was that the instructions had not even been read (and this is sadly true of even the best ISO9002 tribe oh best beloved) there was not a single polythene bag to be found. Indeed had the instruction been read the specified bag would have been deemed to be too small and the Technical Man would have been dragged from his cupboard and forced to specify a suitable substitute.

Under these circumstances and an imminent collection, the Production Men set about finding a substitute bag and re-packing the soluble bags into the substitute bag and resealing the cartons and re-palletising them. Four Production men took two hours to complete half of the pallets that Saturday morning. Although what they found might be said to be one of those invaluable lessons that only a massive cock-up like this can teach.

Many of the cartons that were opened to re-pack contained soluble bags that had opened, as if by magic, and had either failed at the seam or inexplicably at one side. This was not a failure at the original filling and sealing stage because the Production Men concerned could not possibly have ignored the amount of material falling from the bags as they loaded the cartons. Either the bags had been of poor quality from the outset or they had found enough moisture within the box for them to fail overnight.

So how will the second half of the job fare when the Production Men re-start the task of re-bagging on Monday at 06:00? Will the re-bagged soluble bags suffer the same fate within the polybags but just more slowly? What will the Client’s customer see and say when they open the cartons on site? How could these problems have been avoided? How does this help to progress the strategic ambition to be the “hedgehogs who handle difficult powders”? Should we be glad that the Technical Man didn’t have something else on his mind on Valentine’s eve?