VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [40]
The sun was a vivid orange disc on the horizon when Murphy Maguire drove up the access road to the Oakton plant. In that early morning light, something caught his eye. He saw a white SUV parked next to the Dumpsters. Leaning against one of them was a ladder. Murphy stopped his car to see what was going on – and a moment later observed that someone was inside the Dumpster poking around. With the thought of industrial espionage crossing his mind, Murph flipped open his cell phone and pressed a speed-dial number for plant security.
“Suggins, this is Maguire. I need you and all available guards to meet me by the Dumpsters at once. And I do mean immediately.”
“Yes, sir.”
With that, Murphy tromped on the gas of his big old Chevy Suburban and zoomed across the lot, heading straight for the white SUV. He hit the brakes and came to a stop directly behind it, pointed the lens of the cell-phone camera and began taking pictures of the vehicle and its license plate.
Then he got out of his car and called to the figure crouching in the Dumpster and apparently rooting through the plant’s trash:
“Excuse me, is there something I can help you with?”
Wayne Reese stood up. Murphy blinked in surprise.
“Hey, good morning, Maguire!” Wayne said cheerily. “Hold on one second; let me just finish making a couple of notes.”
He crouched down in the trash again, concealing all but his cue-ball shaven head. Just then, from around the corner of the plant came Suggins and another uniformed guard speeding toward the Dumpsters in a golf cart. Maguire flipped open his phone one more time to call off the cavalry.
“Suggins, it’s Maguire again. False alarm. Go back inside, please.”
The golf cart promptly made a U-turn and went back in the direction from which it had come.
“Getting back to your question,” said Wayne, standing up again, “yes, you can help me by telling me what this is.”
He tossed an object down to Murphy, who caught it and turned it over in his fingers as he examined it.
“There are hundreds, maybe thousands of those in here,” said Wayne.
“Well, I cannot tell you exactly what it is, but I can tell you that it is scrap.”
“Why is it scrap?”
“Wrong color. It’s supposed to be green, not yellow. An operator pulled the wrong dye from the rack.”
“Well, good,” said Wayne. “At least we know the cause. That’s another opportunity we can target.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, what are you doing out here? When I first saw you, I thought you might be some kind of spy.”
“I am a spy,” said Wayne, coming down the ladder. “I’m gathering intelligence. By analyzing what’s in the trash, I get an idea of what kind of waste this plant produces – of the kind of money we are throwing away, just to have to pay someone to haul it away.”
“Um, I hope you do not think this kind of thing is typical for us. I remember this incident, and I can assure you that the operator who made the mistake has been disciplined. He got a two-day suspension without pay and a formal warning that he could be terminated if an accident like this happens again.”
“That’s not a solution,” said Wayne.
“Excuse me?”
“Unless the accident happens because of outright negligence or sabotage, you really shouldn’t blame the worker. That solves nothing. Instead, I would recommend poka-yoke.”
“Poka-what?”
“Poka-yoke. It’s Japanese. It means to make something mistake proof. Fail-safe. The operator grabbed the wrong dye because the way the work area and the process were set up enabled him to make the mistake. That’s something we should look into.”
At first Murphy just stared at Wayne. He instantly and completely understood the essence of what Wayne had just said. On the other hand, here was this outsider – a damnyankee outsider, no less – digging through the trash in order, as Murphy felt, to find fault. It was rude; it was offensive somehow. Yet the man was operations manager