Weather: Cold with a little snow possible this week
Trail Conditions: Good to Very good
Trails are good. Air is cold and beef is hot. We are headed for a few cold days this next week. Good news is the trails should stay hard and flat.
I was messing around trying to do some time lapse stuff with the web cam and I deleted the live webcam pages by mistake. I’ll get it fixed when I get a chance.
This Thursday February 19th Nick Keller and his friends are doing the 2015 Valentine’s Day 500. They will be riding 500 miles in one day raising money for Cancer Patients. As I did last year we will again be raising the prices of our sandwiches, but I will donate your total food bill to Snowball Cancer. Last year we raised over $1000. I also have a pledge sheet at the bar if you would just like to donate cash. Or go to Nick’s website and you can donate there. His web site is Click here Nick has over 90,000 miles on his Yamaha and is going to ride it until it hits 99,956 miles. Age 56 is when his mother Mary Jane passed away. You can also donate online at Click here
You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate this story
A toothpaste factory had a problem. They sometimes shipped empty boxes without the tube inside. This challenged their perceived quality with the buyers and distributors. Understanding how important the relationship with them was, the CEO of the company assembled his top people. They decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem. The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, and third-parties selected. Six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution – on time, on budget, and high quality. Everyone in the project was pleased.
They solved the problem by using a high-tech precision scale that would sound a bell and
flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighed less than it should. The line would stop,
someone would walk over, remove the defective box, and then press another button to
re-start the line. As a result of the new package monitoring process, no empty boxes
were being shipped out of the factory.
With no more customer complaints, the CEO felt the $8 million was well spent. He
then reviewed the line statistics report and discovered the number of empty boxes
picked up by the scale in the first week was consistent with projections, however,
the next three weeks were zero! The estimated rate should have been at least a dozen
boxes a day. He had the engineers check the equipment, they verified the report as
accurate.
Puzzled, the CEO traveled down to the factory, viewed the part of the line where the
precision scale was installed, and observed just ahead of the new $8 million dollar
solution sat a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. He
asked the line supervisor what that was about.
“Oh, that,” the supervisor replied,” Bert, the kid from maintenance, put it there because he was tired of walking over, removing the box and re-starting the line every time the bell rang.”
