About 20 years ago the braided-steel steam hose on my shirt unit sprung a leak.  It was one of those leaks that was spraying steam onto some electrical parts so prompt attention was in order.  The problem was that my supplier didn’t have the correct diameter hose in stock.  I needed a ¾” (if I remember correctly), an unusual size, but all that was available was ½”.  That was good enough, I thought.

The most peculiar things can cause poor production.  How about a steam hose?

  After all, it certainly remedied the immediate problem; putting this hose on stopped the leak dead in its tracks.

Then came a quality problem and a sail down the river named denial.  The hose in question was the return steam hose on the rear steam chest – the one that pressed the back of the shirt.  The backs of the shirts were not drying completely.  The steam chest had a cold spot on it.  I hammered the steam trap, threw in a couple of cuss words, nothing helped. 

It took what seemed like forever to arrive at the obvious cause.  I eventually said to myself, “Hey Don, don’t you think that the machine’s designer used a ¾” hose for a reason?”  It happens to be a fact that ¾” hose is two and a half times larger than ½” hose.  I wasn’t thinking of that at the time that I attached the ½” hose.  I probably didn’t know that fact then anyway.  Fixing the leak was my only thought.  The hose was probably longer than twelve inches and much smaller than the engineers had intended it to be.  If ½” would have worked, ½” would be what they would have prescribed.  By installing the smaller hose, I was literally choking the steam flow through the machine.  The condensed steam could never be removed from the machine fast enough.  To this day, I can’t believe that it took me more than a second to figure that out!  So we had to increase the dry time, that didn’t work so well.  The touch-up person had to dry every shirt on a hot head.  Production slowed to significantly lesser rate so that she could keep up, sort of.  What a costly mistake that was! 

Fast-forward about 17 years.

I had put this entire episode deep within the archives of my memory bank until one day in Colorado.  I was working in a drycleaning plant and there were issues with productivity in the drycleaning department.  A certain sub-par level of production had become the norm and it needed to be addressed.  We began measuring the pieces pressed per hour and found serious deficiencies and one particular press station was significantly poorer than the others.  The presser had a most interesting defense.  He was operating a utility press.  He called me over to his press and activated the lever that opens the steam to the head.  I have never seen anything like this.  It took 4 or 5 seconds for steam to flow out of the head!  And even after waiting that time, the steam flow was very weak.  I have never seen this before or since.  The reason?  Well you can probably guess given the first part of this column.  Sometime earlier, the steam hose from the main manifold to the top steam head had been replaced with the incorrect part.  I suspect that the hose had, like mine years earlier, sprung a leak.  In its place was a 48” all-steam iron hose!    This hose had, indeed, choked off the steam flow like the 2004 Yankees!  I never dared to ask how long that had been like that for fear of truly embarrassing someone.  This, to me, demonstrated a lack of monitoring productivity, to say the least.

So, the lesson du jour is that all equipment is designed to perform a certain way, but don’t expect the same results if you alter the original design.  Whenever you are evaluating  the productivity or the quality from any machine, be certain that you start out with factory specs for parts, padding, adjustments and operation

 "If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got!"