Development Nightmares chronicles humorous anecdotes from readers who have developed products and lived to tell about it. Submit a 200 word or less story to this forum and if we use it in one of our electronic newsletters, you will earn a quick $50 for your efforts.

A large office furniture manufacturer decided it needed a steel desktop to compete with a larger office furniture co. They spent 2 years & $12 million developing a fully automated machine to produce these steel desktops.

The machine was completed & installed on the factory floor, ran one time, and never used again. Someone decided they really didn't want to produce steel desktops. They decided to stay with the laminated wood.

Then they began firing everyone connected to the program. The Chief Engineer was dismissed for "lacking leadership skills".

Sounds like a Dilbert stip, but this really happened.

Project: The Traveler

Application: CONSUMER

Description:
A portable theft resistant lock box, for securing keys and wallet while playing tennis or at the pool.

The Challenge:
In short, this was the project from hell and a complete marketing failure! I include it here for the entertainment of my fellow product developers everywhere.
I suppose that I may be a little too harsh on the poor traveler. It was the brainchild of a smart sales manager, and a good idea at that. And, not to mention, my team and I were quite proud of the clever design and the challenges that we met.
This was to be a two-size product offering. It was targeted for high volume retail power markets with tough performance specs and tight point-of-sales pricing. The product was to be thermo-injection molded plastic that incorporated a customized Masterlock bicycle cable lock. It needed a pry-resistant lid with a robust hidden hinge. The lid was to lock when the lock shaft was in place. When the shaft was removed, the lid could be opened with a push button latch. I was given this project after completing a couple of successful projects and I was feeling a bit cocky.
This all happened about 15 years ago, but the pain still lingers. We started with a million dollar budget and the complete commitment of upper management (or at least their version of commitment). We completed the project, met the original specs and filled the production pipeline in a little over a year and then everything came to a grinding halt. No one wanted to buy the product. So, what happened? Answer: I’m not sure – in fact, I don’t think anyone is sure. I do know, for a fact, that this product could have been a lot better and the project could have gone a lot smoother and faster had the company followed one simple rule – Control Thy Vendors!
It was an accepted fact that a local Industrial Design firm held the company owners in a strange Svengali-like spell. They weren’t a vendor – they were “partners”. The liaison from the ID firm was fond of making veiled threats to the marketing managers and asserted his, we’ll-tell-on-you power over them. For the most part we (design and marketing) just worked with them the best we could, and around them when we couldn’t. Why they were held in such high esteem, was explained by a Marketing manager as the Far Away Man Syndrome: “The farther away a man is from the company, the smarter he is”.
This firm’s aim seemed to be to take over the complete design of all of the company’s products. Fortunately, for us engineers, their hourly fee was too high and they didn’t have the capability (Pro-E was very expensive back then). But, that didn’t stop them from trying. They insisted on being involved in every decision in the project. They interfered with marketing’s research (they knew more) and packaging (they had better vendors). They fought me on the newly developed SLA prototyping. They claimed it was inaccurate and a fad (what visionaries!) – besides their $150/hr model shop could hand make “better” models. (This was the same model shop that charged $20,000 for foam core models – and we paid it!) I won that fight – but lost most of the others (hey, I was young and naive.) They displayed their power by taking their time making decisions that they claimed only they could make. For instance, it took the firm 8 months to decide on the exact colors (it had to be just the right yellow or the world would collapse). This held up packaging, catalogs and sales fliers.
They also promoted bizarre strategies. For instance, one day the ID liaison informed my designers that our competitive strategy would be to design the product to be deliberately complex and difficult to manufacture – this will discourage competitors from duplicating the product. Of course, my smart-ass designer (my hero and good friend) asked, why wouldn’t they just compete with a version that was lower cost due to efficient design and manufacturing methods? The liaison, turned and left, after all, who would be foolish enough to choose efficiency as a competitive strategy – dumb engineers.
Their reach even extended to our engineering management. My team couldn’t get a decision out of our managers. We were between an ID firm and a hard place. We needed to present our mechanism ideas - the clock was ticking and we didn’t have time for one of their decision sabbaticals. That’s when my lead designer, our model maker and me came up with a plan – a deliciously evil plan (of course it was evil – we’re engineers.) We came up with a great hinge and mechanism design. But, how to keep it from being derailed before we could present it to the CEO? The solution was simple: we kept our mouths shut.
The big presentation meeting was coming up fast and we let everyone believe that we didn’t have anything new to present. On the day of the meeting our engineering manager suddenly had something to do and couldn’t make it (the big woosey). The evil ID firm was well prepared and smug, arriving with a hand made model of their convoluted design. It was going to be a bloodbath and a humiliating defeat for engineering, in a war that we never declared. But, we had a secret weapon – a fully functioning model.
The design manager nervously opened the meeting and allowed the ID guy to present his model. When finished, the ID firm guys smirked and nodded to one another. The design manager then turned to us and said: “ and now Bill and his team will tell us some of their ideas”. The lead designer then pulled the model, that he was hiding, out from under his chair and in one swift operation demonstrated its superiority. Without a word, it was obvious: we made a Porsche - they made a steam shovel.
What happen next is one of the most amazing examples of management self preservation I have ever witnessed – Our design manager whisked the model from the designer’s hand, held it up and said, “This was made to my exact specifications!”
While our jaws hit the table, the ID guys erupted into a cacophony of “yeah, buts” and “hey!”. They claimed it was unfair that they didn’t get to see the model before the meeting so that they could formulate a rebuttal (I’m not kidding!). The company owners came through and approved our design.
In some ways the project didn’t really begin until that day. It took a bold move on our part to seize control of the project (that we were responsible for in the first place). As a young engineer, I learned that not everyone involved in a project, has the company’s best interests at heart. Developing a product requires professionals to stick out their necks and do the hard things. Projects reach a successful conclusion by talented team members being results oriented, not effort orientated. Unsuccessful companies are preoccupied with uniformity, philosophy and hours worked – they are more interested in what people are doing rather than what they did. Successful companies are focused on specifications and schedule. The first thing that you need, before starting a project, is to have the commitment to finish it.
Well, anyway, the project moved on. We faced many more challenges, technical and political, but in the end, we were able to put a stake in the ground. Since that time, we have all moved on to bigger and better things. I am happy to say that I have never encountered a set up as bizarre as that one. Our CEO finally gave up and went back to his dairy farm. The industrial design firm now provides full service – by contracting engineers like me (but not me). And, for a modest fee, they will provide you with one of those new-fangled rapid prototypes.
As for the poor traveler, it just didn’t catch on. No one is sure why it has joined the ranks of the Edsel and the disk camera. Some said it was priced too high, some said it was priced too low and sold in the wrong venue. Maybe it was the packaging. Or maybe people just weren’t as mistrusting of their fellow man as we hoped. Although, there is one other possibility – could it be it was the wrong yellow?
Yeah, that’s it, the wrong yellow.

I worked as an sheet metal assembler for an aerospace manufacturer in Florida in the late 1980's. I had to layout and drill-up a leading edge skin for a wing flap. This was a formed piece of .032 aluminum sheet that had been Chem-milled and corrosion treated at considerable cost. If you scrapped one you might not be fired, but you would be chewed out pretty good and be behind schedual for the time to drill-up a new one. Our shop was inside a sheet steel hangar and in the summer temperatures of 120 degrees F were not uncommon. During the construction of the flap we had several inspections that were performed by DCAS. One of these was the diameter pin check. The inspector would have 2 pins of different diameters. One pin would have to pass through the hole and the second would not. One afternoon I had a skin that was failed by the inspector and I couldn't figure out why. I told my supervisor Hank and he made a very wise suggestion. He told me to put the skin into our air conditioned break room for a couple of hours and ask that it be re-inspected while in the break room. I asked why and he told me that the tolerence specified on the print was specified at 72 degrees F and it was easily over 100F in the shop. Sure enough 2 hours later the skin passed the inspection. Hank had set the temperature of the break room at 72 degrees.

Designed and installed a assy machine for a car assy line. Design and Development took one year and finally machine was successfully installed.
the machine has done over 6000 operations. Major changes were done in car body design and due to that assy machine became obsolete.
The machine was pulled off line.

Analysts tried to pull out the odd's happened during the development,neither design team nor production team were soley responsiblle for this...concludes analysts. machine development
was initiated in wrong time was my conclusion.

Expert opinions for the below..//??

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quote:

Originally posted by kumars:
Designed and installed a assy machine for a car assy line. Design and Development took one year and finally machine was successfully installed.
the machine has done over 6000 operations. Major changes were done in car body design and due to that assy machine became obsolete.
The machine was pulled off line.

Analysts tried to pull out the odd's happened during the development,neither design team nor production team were soley responsiblle for this...concludes analysts. machine development
was initiated in wrong time was my conclusion.

In the early 1980’s, while the “energy crunch” of the 70’s had not yet been forgotten, I developed a power-saving control for commercial/industrial fluorescent lighting. My sales rep and I were scheduled to demo it at a Midwestern steel mill, but when we arrived, their plant maintenance man was out, so my sales guy talked them into letting us hook it up ourselves. I opened the breaker panel, shut off the circuit, and wired it into the 277-volt lighting circuit. All we needed was a small #18-gauge control wire from the neutral line to power its control circuitry. As I was pulling it down through the panel, a stray strand must have contacted a live circuit, because the wire exploded into a 3-foot diameter arc-flash that punched out all three 200-amp fuses and left us standing in the dark, wondering what just happened. There were no emergency lights and they had no spare fuses. Thirteen machines, running at $100K per hour, were shut down for over an hour while they sent someone to buy fuses. Needless to say, we didn’t get the sale, and I got out of the energy-saving business!

So far, I've read 2 similar stories about creating "white elephant". As an engineering and technical guy, we always fall into an interest & trap of focusing ' design the thing right'.  However, there is thing more important before a project take place.  That is, are we 'designning the right thing'? This will require a ROI justification.

 Always have the sequence:

1. Design the right thing, and then,

2. Design the thing right.