The legend of the German trained machinist goes something like this; young man, chunk of steel and a file. Days of manual labor to deliver a piece of steel made square, no intricate design, no machine tools, just a file and human hands used to deliver a now perfectly square piece of steel.
Obviously a test to see how much the “new” student was willing to tolerate, or was it? By careful evaluation and planning before the work started one could accomplish the final result with the least amount of file strokes through thought and a plan. The military even has a saying in the seven P’s to explain it: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
In today’s world of endless new tools designed to reduce labor, often times we start the project without laying out the steps to completion. Hand milking a cow requires a large amount of time, too much time to be cost effective, but if we milked them by hand pre-milking stimulation would not be required as the milking itself would allow for transition of the milk from alveolar to cisternal during the process. Machine milking is faster, requiring the stimulation to be somewhat complete before the start as the machine possesses the capability to out milk the stimulation. That leaves one with two options; milk slower to allow the cow to “catch up” or better prepare her to optimize the mechanical advantage of the machine while allowing full or nearly full cooperation of the cow.
Look at your system, does it start with the cow first? Does the procedure and process optimize the mechanical advantages available? Just because we possess the mechanical advantage to accomplish the job doesn’t mean we don’t need to address its proper use.
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