A Japanese soap manufacturing company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a box of soap that was empty.
Management tasked its engineers to solve the problem permanently to avoid any reoccurrence.
The engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast.
But a rank-and-file employee that was posed the same problem came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line.
He switched the fan on, and as each soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.