On 25 Apr 2005 14:11:37 -0700, jim rozen wrote:
In article , Dave Hinz says...

Wish I had a few boxes of that cloth...

He saved the company about a million dollars per year.
Basically by using both sides of the rag.

The nice thing was they had the policy that anyone who did
that, got a sizeable cut of the savings.

Yup, GE used to do that too - called it the "Business Driver" program.
(no clue why the name but they had a racecar logo so it looked good on
the shirts or something). They discontinued it because, among other
reasons, there was a bored third-shift tech who kept turning in things
like "part number (xyz) has the same function as part number (abc). abc
is an off-the-shelf commodity product, part (xyz) is custom-machined. We
could save (real number - with 5 digits) per year, based on a (number)
of scanners per year, by switching the 3 instances of (xyz) to (abc).
This is without considering possible quantity discounts (etc etc etc)"

They'd counter with "changing the bill of materials would cost (blah),
and we have a contract for (xyz) which would cost (blah) to break, so
shut up and go away", and then do it anyway a while later.

After a few of those, I stopped participating.