British submarine shipyard piping interference problem

Design for manufacturability failure compounded by inventory cannibalization — ten-year build cycle vs three-year target.

In designing a submarine or some ship, you have pipes for water and you have pipes for oil, and they may have both going through, and one crosses the other — nature doesn't work that way. It's a common problem. I had a student from what's now LGO working at one of the submarine shipyards in Britain — Vickers or somebody — they owned one of the shipyards, and she went over. She was put in the piping shop specifically for that problem. People would look at the drawing and find, this is impossible to build, what's on the drawing doesn't fit. They had various ways to measure things in the field. But this piping had to use this metal and that piping had to use that metal, and they were always out of inventory, because when they had a problem, someone would steal from inventory that had already been ordered, which might be a nine-month lead time. They'd get that problem solved, but all they did was create other problems for the future. As a result, it took them ten years to build a submarine when it should have only taken three.