Story

Find a cost effective solution

Find a cost effective solution

In a soap manufacturing company, they were making bathing soaps. The soap blocks were made and wrapped in a packaging paper automatically on an assembly conveyer belt and finally packed into cartons.
Many times it happened that the machine wrapped the paper without the soap. To rectify the problem, the company decided to buy an x-ray scanner for $50,000 to check on the assembly line whether the wrapper contained soap or not.
Can you help find a cost effective solution?
Share on

Your Comments

1 Comment

Abhinav
Abhinav
One way would be to have air blown into the conveyor belt after the packing is done! The packs without the soap would be very light and would be blown off the belt, leaving behind the packs with soap.

Similar Stories


The mistakes we make in our everyday life

• We are hardwired to make these mistakes • Few biases are simply evolutionary • These errors affect all of us including the bright ones • Experience is just not enough to overcome • but expertise is required to recognize and overcome

Few of biases as below · Anchoring - When an individual depends too heavily on an initial piece of information during decision making · Fixed pie - When we assume that our interests conflict with the other party's interests and we play adversarial · Framing - When we decide on our options differently when the options are presented with positive or negative connotations · Vividness – When we pay attention to strong features at the expense of less, that could be more impactful · Over confidence – When our subjective confidence is greater than the objective accuracy · Escalation – When initial decision is followed up with an irrational decision to justify the initial decision

Few ways to mitigate these biases are · Learn to recognize the bias · Use slow, effortful and logical thinking (System 2) · Avoid fast, automatic and effortless thinking (System 1) · Avoid negotiations which are thrust upon when not ready · Learn through use of stories, examples, exercises · Bring an outsider perspective