It Adds Up By The End Of The Year

When calculating inventory, do the cafeteria workers factor in scrap rates for Toaster fires?  


 Well that's just good business sense.  Leakage, and all.


Sure.  Anybody who's worked in manufacturing knows that something less than 100% of the products you make go out the door as finished products.  Depending on what your product is, that percentage can vary greatly.  Companies that make large products like cars and airplanes will have numbers over 99%, where some extremely small electronic components may only get to the 50-60% range.  It's how life is, and the role of super geniuses such as engineers is to get that number as high as possible.  


That's just sad, Jeremy.  Go on with your story.  


When working in any field with finished products, incoming materials have to be purchased.  Anyone can easily calculate the amount of material to use to create the finished product if conditions are perfect, but it's much more involved when factoring in things like scrap rates, leakage, six-sigma parameters like CpK, process yield etc.  All of those factors cut into your final tally, so in order to have a certain number of pieces out the door, you need to start out making that many, plus some amount of extra that you know will become junk along the way.  When purchasing your raw materials, you need to factor this in as well and purchase more stuff to make into products.  

The restaurant business is not immune to this, I would imagine.  Sure, the people who work in the Adorably Tiny Cafeteria Thing In My Building take into account the average number of Coke products purchased per day, and how many yogurts are left in the cooler, and approximately how many people are going to be on vacation any given day when ordering food to fill the place.  I just wonder whether or not they take into account what percentage of extra bread and bagels they need to buy to account for the portions that are destroyed by the Famed Toaster Of Hades.  It can't be all that much...no more than one or two servings per day go up in flames, but there's a number there, and I'd like to believe that somebody looks at it.  

Today's Sametime Status comes to you as a thought that popped into my head not long ago.  I was in the process of paying for my iced tea when the cashier looked up, got a terrified look on her face and, without finishing my transaction, stood up and walked past me.  To my complete lack of surprise, I turned around to see the telltale smoke billowing out of the Toaster.  Another bagel bites the dust.