“I knew it,” Ronnie complained. “We set up a control system to hold people more accountable and now somebody has sandbagged the control system.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Look, we have a tight production budget. We cannot afford screw-ups, on either the pace or the quality of the output. Sometimes, production gets behind and we don’t find out about it until it’s too late. So, our QC people put in a control system that counts production every five minutes. The data is collected, compiled on a report and automatically emailed to the manager every Friday. He can see trends in pace, shift productivity and work station productivity.”

“What does the manager do with the report?”

“Every Monday, he meets with the production team to talk about the report. The team can really see where they screwed up,” Ronnie smiled.

“So, what’s the problem?”

“The control system count was off. We had to bring in another QC inspector to do an independent audit of the finished inventory. At first, the count between the control system and the inventory was pretty close, but after a couple of weeks, the numbers went whacky. Turns out, the production team has been messing with the control system counter. They were swiping finished goods through the counter multiple times one day and skipping the counter on other days. The control system was always wrong.”

“Imagine that?” I said.