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Cheryl O'Connell's Rolling Pegboard. Cheryl O'Connell's inventory-control invention is a little harder to figure out on sight. In 1988 O'Connell, a senior buyer, noticed that the company was storing many of its inexpensive labels in a very expensive stock-retrieval system. Buried beneath fasteners, springs, and stampings, the labels were hard to find -- and often their adhesive had worn off by the time they were located.
After scavenging through existing material, including a typing table and a four-sided corkboard, O'Connell and a coworker designed a special rack for the labels. It is, essentially, a pegboard on wheels, with rolls of labels hanging from the pegs. "We got a lot of ribbing," she recalls. "You look at it and you say, 'It's not a rack and it's not shelving, so what is it?' "
Nobody pokes fun anymore, though -- especially those who remember what it was like to spend a half hour hunting down labels. "I don't work with labels, but when I think of things, I like to follow through," says O'Connell. "Now I always find myself asking everybody, 'Why do you do things that way?' "
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Harry Moumdjian's Quality-Testing Aquarium. Harry Moumdjian has been building -- and rebuilding -- diaphragm assemblies for the past 16 years. When the company appealed for new ideas, he knew he wanted to find a way to cut down the number of faulty assemblies that came back from the inspection department. "They always found leaks," he says.
Moumdjian made his supervisor an offer. Let me do the testing, he said, and I'll give you a 100% leak-free guarantee. "Always, I was talking about it before," he says. "When they said to put ideas on paper, I did. Everybody said it was a very good idea." With the help of the model shop, Moumdjian set about building an aquarium big enough to hold one of his diaphragm assemblies. To test an assembly, he figured, he could simply run an air hose through it, then stand back and check for air bubbles. The sole sticking point: finding a way to position the assembly so he could see it from every angle. "Once we got that, it was very nice," says Moumdjian. "I can tell exactly where it's leaking from, so I can fix it."
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Bob Comeau's Wheeling and Dealing. Bob Comeau found plenty of motivation in his aching back. As manager of the wire department, he simply wanted to relieve the pain of carrying spools of wire, which can weigh as much as 50 pounds apiece. "Lifting those things was painful and time-consuming," he says.
Since the company was after ideas, Comeau imagined what it would be like to have a rack with wheels that would hold all 35 or so of the giant rolls, so he could move them to the cutting, measuring, and stripping machine. He experimented by building a version that would hold just six rolls, but even that "proved dangerous. The thing could tip easily," he says. But Comeau remained committed to the concept. "I knew this could really save time," he says. He finally hit upon the answer, late last year: he built immobile racks for the spools and mounted the machine on wheels. Now Comeau simply wheels the machine, pushing it like a supermarket cart, to the appropriate spool of wire.
Comeau's invention worked so well that he began trying to simplify every job in the department: he added armrests to some of the machines and invented a hand tool that allowed the dies on one machine to be changed more easily. Most of his creations have used scrap parts. "I have these little brainstorms sometimes," he says.
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Beverly Scibilia's Air Campaign. As part of her job assembling temperature controls for hospital sterilizers, Beverly Scibilia had to pull down an arbor press to push three pivots into a metal plate. "It was hard on the arms," says Scibilia, who also had to use two different fixtures to get the job done.
Judging from the number of ideas she saw people coming up with, she concluded that "we've got some very brilliant people around here," she says. So she decided to enlist their brains to find a better way. One day she asked a group to gather round the large, heavy press. "I showed them how we used it," she recalls. "That got everybody talking about what would be good." A few folks suggested using compressed air to force the pivots into their places. Scibilia then worked with the model shop to design such a machine, which was made mostly out of parts the company already had.
The collaboration paid off. Scibilia now uses a machine that simply requires her to press two buttons and wait for an indicator light to turn red. What used to take an hour on the arbor press takes no more than 15 minutes. Another machine, which works on the same principle, reduced setup time from 45 minutes to a matter of seconds. "I'm more interested in what I do now," she says.
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Vinny Petrillo's Revelation. Vinny Petrillo didn't invent anything, really. He just felt obliged to let management in on one of its long-standing buying blunders. "One day I asked, Why do we have to do things this way?" the assembler recalls.
More specifically, Petrillo was wondering why the company was ordering a certain kind of switch that came with three unnecessary terminals. It was a logical question, since he spent as much as two hours a day removing those terminals. "We were paying the switch manufacturer to put the terminals on, and we were paying Vinny to take them off," says Hamilton. "That happens because the buyer doesn't have the slightest idea what the piece does; and Vinny doesn't have the slightest idea where it comes from."
