"Some of them did drop through. Others dropped because we poked sticks up the flue. That is to say, an army of stock chasers did their level best to keep everyone happy.
"It was bedlam around the shop. It took three months on an average to complete an order.
"I found much of the delay was due to certain Victorian notions about set-up time. The prevailing idea was to give an operator a good big job to minimize that item of expense.
"Sometimes the job was so big it took 60 days to run it through a single operation.
"Oh, me! oh, my! the inventories of finished goods that piled up. The tote boxes full of work in process that cluttered up the scenery.
"And the complaints from customers who were waiting for orders!
"Funny thing about our business, you can't get a customer to accept a couple of ¼-in. taps in place of the ½-in. one he's ordered.
"So I had to revamp the whole shooting match. First on the program was to find out what was made and what was making. Then we withdrew from the shop all work in process except what actually applied on orders in the house or what was needed to fill out our stock on an item on which we had no order, but on which past experience had taught us we'd get one in the course of the next 30 days.
"You should have seen the pile of tote boxes we stuck under the boilers.
"Well, the next job was to figure out the most economical lots to send through the works. That figure was arrived at simply by choosing such a size that no single operation could possibly take more than a day. In a word, I made sure that every single lot would move every single day.