It was another quiet day in my department, component engineering, which was responsible for ensuring the quality of vendor-supplied components. The peace ended when a call came from manufacturing, informing us that the production line had stopped due to a failing communications cable. The shift manager explained that the manufacturing department had exhausted its stock of working, 50-foot RS-232 cables, which our company had procured from two vendors. During final testing of the entire machine, cables from Vendor A usually failed, but cables from Vendor B always worked fine. When a cable failed, workers tossed it into a nearby box but did not discard it. Finally, manufacturing had exhausted its supply of cables from Vendor B and had no more working cables from Vendor A.
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