Digital Inspection vs Paper Inspection

In some of my, my favorite highlights from the book, the one that's the, the funniest to me is they bought some automated machine, a robot, right? And everybody's excited about the robot, like, we got the new mx, blah, blah, blah, robot. And I was like, wow, you got the new. And it reminds me a lot of when everybody was going to mpi and everybody's like, we're getting, we're getting.

And this will fix everything. We've got the solution.

This will fix everything. That reminds me too of what was the thing that we used to have to do at BMW dealerships called qm. What? Qms.

Oh, qms, yeah. Quality Management Systems. Yes.

Same. Same situation where I'm sitting there with a bunch of dealers at the LA Auto show, actually. And I won't name the dealers, but one of them is huge ego. And he's like, the factory guys are sitting at the table too. And he's like, oh, yeah, you gotta do qms. It's the greatest. We're certified or. And I, I said, did your CSI go up? No, no. I'm like, are you making more money?

No, no, no. But you documented all your processes.

So flavor of the month, right? Yeah.

So every, well, you had rooms of binders of all this information that nobody looked at.

So everybody's, everybody's signing up for these digital inspections. But yep, every time they'd put them in, the hours per hour would go down, sales would go down. And you know, I used to always tell those guys when they come around, I'm like, I'll tell you how to fix your software if you, if you want, because it was the process, you know, the system wasn't, wasn't really taking into consideration that a technician, it just wasn't user friendly. And so every time we'd unhook that hours per hour and sales would go up, which is paper, right? So same same premise in this book is everybody's like, oh, we got the new robot. They're like, wow, you got the new robot, that's cool. You got the robot. And so this guy is trying to figure out how to turn his factory around. And he goes, he's at some meeting and his old college professor happens to be there and they're, they're leaving and passing. His college professor like, how's it going? And he, he says, oh, we got the new robot. The guy said, oh, are your profits up? And he's like, no. And he says, are the overall efficiencies up? He's like, well, no, the efficiencies in that part of the factory up 30% or whatever. But no, our overall efficiencies are flatter. He's like, oh, okay, well, don't tell me about the robot.

He's like, well, your robot really isn't working then, is it?

Yeah, because, I mean, you know, we've. We've found that a paper inspection sheet works pretty good if you do it right. Like, and I'm not saying that technology isn't good, but that was the thing in this book that just, you know, really hit home. Because the first time I read the book was at the time when I was getting a lot of pressure from manufacturers to put in the digital ones. But every time we did it, the sales would go down and it was super expensive, too. Like, how am I going to tell a client you're going to spend five grand a month and watch your sales go down because you got the new software right?

Yeah, it's fancy and you get a lot of good data, but you can't sell anything more. In fact, you sell less. It's just not a good equation.

What. I'm thinking of one. Hopefully you'll say it, but what was your. What was the biggest takeaway in the book for you?

Wow.

I don't know. I just think, honestly, like, for them, they were locked into an old way of thinking and they just, like, this is just how everything's always been done. And I think what, that as they went through the process, they learned to look at things from a different viewpoint and kind of look at things as a whole and everything related to the goal, which is the title of the book. And if it didn't, if it didn't improve the goal, which was, you know, making money, it's throughput, right? Selling products, then they abandoned it and they went on try to find something better. That was my takeaway.