Thank you. One thing people never take into account is the human capital required to produce things. Some jobs require very little skill and can just be churned without too much drop off (like warehouse picking), but when you start to add machinery and increase the complexity, you want build and maintain an experienced workforce. There always ends up being some process quirk or workaround utilized by the workers on the floor that was never planned for or even noticed in the upper levels of the company (this ‘automated’ process gets stuck in a loop here and has to be reset, that angle or sensor is always 3 degrees off, so factor that in, you can’t use both of these lines at once because they’ll freeze up, etc.). Things like that aren’t typically written down in the instruction manuals or the SOPs, and get developed and passed on by word of mouth, so to a top-down view of the whole system, they don’t exist, but they’ll essential to the smooth operation of the endeavor. That’s why the workforce disruption of the pandemic is still causing havoc, many of the experienced hands were on and off unemployment, many decided it was time to retire, and many others took other jobs and aren’t coming back. You can restart the machinery of the production lines fairly easily if they’ve been idle for months, but losing the people who knew their ins and outs is much more difficult to overcome.
Although I generally agree -- I've had my own issues in the last year with plastic deli bags -- I think we can't remind ourselves enough that some of this "anecdata" is just confirmation bias and availability heuristics.
The internet is a big place. The world is a big place. One plastic bag manufacturer might be doing better than another at any given time, in a number of complex ways that may or may not relate to the pandemic. One person starts a thread about it on the internet, and everyone who's recently had an issue, related to the pandemic or not, is going to pipe up and add their own story that the thread has prompted them to remember.
Hell, that's precisely what I did! I couldn't give you any precise statistics on my daily interactions with industrial mistakes before and after the pandemic; all I can bring up is a handful of deli bags that stuck out to me.
But overall, I think the narrative is correct. We've seen this with Boeing, and with GM before it: Overly financialized corporate leadership tends to obsess about the financials and ignore quality and/or safety. GM is basically an insurance and auto loan company attached to a legacy car design firm that's mostly outsourced its manufacturing.
A better or more precise way to put it, probably, is that we have a very fragile system of manufacturing and distribution, with very little slack built in. And we're seeing in real life the costs involved in trading away resiliency for efficiency. The pandemic simply put more pressure on that fragile system than we've seen in awhile, at least at a national or global scale. ("Floods in Thailand kill global hard drive business because all the plants moved to Thailand" is a good localized example.)
Not manufacturing but for another example of "feeling that it's possible for things to get worse," during the pandemic I noticed that stores were significantly messier than they used to be, with more things on the wrong shelves or even lying on the floor, lots of items that people seemed to have selected and then abandoned on a random shelf, that kind of thing. They were short-handed and I guess I hadn't realized how much time workers spent tidying up after customers as opposed to refilling empty shelves or whatever. It sounds so stupid to be like "I went to Target and the sippy cup shelf was disarranged, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" but it was oddly unnerving on top of the (fairly significant) inconvenience.
Thank you. One thing people never take into account is the human capital required to produce things. Some jobs require very little skill and can just be churned without too much drop off (like warehouse picking), but when you start to add machinery and increase the complexity, you want build and maintain an experienced workforce. There always ends up being some process quirk or workaround utilized by the workers on the floor that was never planned for or even noticed in the upper levels of the company (this ‘automated’ process gets stuck in a loop here and has to be reset, that angle or sensor is always 3 degrees off, so factor that in, you can’t use both of these lines at once because they’ll freeze up, etc.). Things like that aren’t typically written down in the instruction manuals or the SOPs, and get developed and passed on by word of mouth, so to a top-down view of the whole system, they don’t exist, but they’ll essential to the smooth operation of the endeavor. That’s why the workforce disruption of the pandemic is still causing havoc, many of the experienced hands were on and off unemployment, many decided it was time to retire, and many others took other jobs and aren’t coming back. You can restart the machinery of the production lines fairly easily if they’ve been idle for months, but losing the people who knew their ins and outs is much more difficult to overcome.
Great comment, thank you!
Although I generally agree -- I've had my own issues in the last year with plastic deli bags -- I think we can't remind ourselves enough that some of this "anecdata" is just confirmation bias and availability heuristics.
The internet is a big place. The world is a big place. One plastic bag manufacturer might be doing better than another at any given time, in a number of complex ways that may or may not relate to the pandemic. One person starts a thread about it on the internet, and everyone who's recently had an issue, related to the pandemic or not, is going to pipe up and add their own story that the thread has prompted them to remember.
Hell, that's precisely what I did! I couldn't give you any precise statistics on my daily interactions with industrial mistakes before and after the pandemic; all I can bring up is a handful of deli bags that stuck out to me.
But overall, I think the narrative is correct. We've seen this with Boeing, and with GM before it: Overly financialized corporate leadership tends to obsess about the financials and ignore quality and/or safety. GM is basically an insurance and auto loan company attached to a legacy car design firm that's mostly outsourced its manufacturing.
A better or more precise way to put it, probably, is that we have a very fragile system of manufacturing and distribution, with very little slack built in. And we're seeing in real life the costs involved in trading away resiliency for efficiency. The pandemic simply put more pressure on that fragile system than we've seen in awhile, at least at a national or global scale. ("Floods in Thailand kill global hard drive business because all the plants moved to Thailand" is a good localized example.)
Not manufacturing but for another example of "feeling that it's possible for things to get worse," during the pandemic I noticed that stores were significantly messier than they used to be, with more things on the wrong shelves or even lying on the floor, lots of items that people seemed to have selected and then abandoned on a random shelf, that kind of thing. They were short-handed and I guess I hadn't realized how much time workers spent tidying up after customers as opposed to refilling empty shelves or whatever. It sounds so stupid to be like "I went to Target and the sippy cup shelf was disarranged, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" but it was oddly unnerving on top of the (fairly significant) inconvenience.
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.