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> Not to me confused with the Soviet shoe factories that produced only one type and orientation of shoe - with the other half of the pair being shipped in from

by neilv 2y ago

> Not to me confused with the Soviet shoe factories that produced only one type and orientation of shoe - with the other half of the pair being shipped in from 500 miles away. This reminded me of something our anti-counterfeiting startup learned when integrating into manufacturing for a high-end outdoor apparel brand. There are efficiencies that the factory gets by, say, parallelizing work on the sleeves of a jacket, while other parts are also worked on. But each batch of dyed outer material may have slight variation in color, no matter how hard they calibrate. So, their processes are designed to ensure that, when the jacket pieces come together, they all came from the same dyed batch of outer material. (There were many interesting tidbits like that, and those were just the ones relevant to us, in terms we could understand. I'm sure the factory also knew a million other things.) Probably the Soviet shoes of TFA had worse problems than slightly mismatched color.

gmueckl 2y ago
I remember my mum (tailor) telling me that even different sections of the same roll of cloth wouldn't match color precisely enough on many rolls they worked with. Colors are deceptively hard.
- neilv 2y ago
  Interesting. This factory might've also had to dealt with that degree of variation. IIRC (unless I'm thinking of a factory for a different customer), their processes include a per-unit container that moves through the production line, and the container starts with various materials that will go into that unit. So I guess that's one way they could ensure that all the outer fabric came from the same part of the same roll.
Terr_ 2y ago
I'm trying to remember the name of a manufacturing strategy, where different mildly-defective components are kept and combined to create a final product that still works because their physical or electrical flaws cancel out. I think I saw in the context of a company that made radios, and at the time (80s?) it didn't really work out for them.
- wigiv 2y ago
  This might be a sub-strategy of the broader manufacturing technique called “binning” in which products of varying quality, size/weight, performance, or some other variable parameter are sorted for later re-combining into similar groups (often to result in different product “grades”), or dissimilar groups to achieve a more uniform total, by average.

by neilv 2y ago

gmueckl 2y ago

I remember my mum (tailor) telling me that even different sections of the same roll of cloth wouldn't match color precisely enough on many rolls they worked with. Colors are deceptively hard.

neilv 2y ago
Interesting. This factory might've also had to dealt with that degree of variation. IIRC (unless I'm thinking of a factory for a different customer), their processes include a per-unit container that moves through the production line, and the container starts with various materials that will go into that unit. So I guess that's one way they could ensure that all the outer fabric came from the same part of the same roll.

Terr_ 2y ago

I'm trying to remember the name of a manufacturing strategy, where different mildly-defective components are kept and combined to create a final product that still works because their physical or electrical flaws cancel out. I think I saw in the context of a company that made radios, and at the time (80s?) it didn't really work out for them.

wigiv 2y ago
This might be a sub-strategy of the broader manufacturing technique called “binning” in which products of varying quality, size/weight, performance, or some other variable parameter are sorted for later re-combining into similar groups (often to result in different product “grades”), or dissimilar groups to achieve a more uniform total, by average.