I started my working life well before I left school and continues working full time on the shop floors till well after I graduated college .
Then of course it was into the office full of menstrual clots with lots of book smarts and no knowledge of the factory or the products it made or the market they were selling them into.
Every year they were off overseas to try & work out why their factory was not prospering like overseas ones were and between visiting brothels & bars actually looked at some plants.
So every year they came back with some idiot idea that was going to propel their plant into the stratisphere of profitability.
All of them were stupid, cost a fortune to impliment ( if they actually were ) and reduced actual output & usually profits .
The fact that the plants they visited were using brand new high volume equipment & their factory was still running plant that was imported from bombed out factories in the UK or obsolete tooling from the USA to bolster the war effort during WWII seemed to be lost on them .
Then when things could not get any worse , we decided we would become another USA and started to import MBA's prior to making our own management gods .
Companies went "global" chasing cheap profits rather than upgrading their own plant.
The last foundry I worked in bought in a US high precision moulding system to make rolling billet that would require no machining , which was a good idea.
They spent $ 3,000,000 on them but hooked them up to the 1945 water supply that was not temperature controlled nor was capable of supplying enough water so we could only pour one furnace ( out of 9 0 at a time if the new moulds were being used .
Every one was running around looking for the "magic wand" when in reality they needed picks & shovels, but picks & shovels means hard work & understanding what your are doing.
Another foundry decided that internal scrap was not profitable to melt as they had already melted it once so it was "more expensive" than melting cheaper bought in scrap.
This was because the MBA management had "worked out" that they made their profit by the difference in price between the bought in scrap & the sold product
Castings are sold by weight so it made the calcualtions easy.
What they failed to understand was the idea of loss leaders and by doing a full remelt we could turn over a 6 to 10 ton furnace in a single 8 hour shift then bleed in purchased scrap at a rate that would allow at least one pour a day if not one pour a shift and while a furnace of cheap bought in scrap might in theory provide the maximum profit, this evaporated after the second 8 hour shift and in many cases the first pour of the week would take a full 36 hours . Then they would get behind so either do full overtime shifts on the weekend or import product from overseas to make up the shortfal on supply contracts .
