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Thursday, February 22, 2007

The IBM Defective Parts Story



This is a rage. They're still laughing about this at IBM. (I have been accused that my blog is not particularly amusing, and is droll, at best, so there.)

Apparently IBM decided to have some parts manufactured in Japan as a trial project. In the specifications, they set out that they will accept three defective parts per 10,000.
When the delivery came in there was an accompanying letter:

"We, Japanese people, had a hard time understanding North American business practices. But the three defective parts per 10,000 have been separately manufactured and have been included in the consignment. Hope this pleases you."
Got it? The Japanese deliberately made three defective parts to satisfy the Americans. hehe
Imagine what it would be like in India, we would have probably had 300 defective parts in 10,000, a tolerance of 3 per cent!

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