General Motors Linden New Jersey locating pin failure

Recap from a prior session. Used as the canonical TPM example — a two-dollar pin that a maintenance engineer never replaced caused several percent scrap. Setup for the broader discussion of acceptable-defect thresholds.

I told the story about General Motors and the failure to maintain the locating pin, which was creating tremendous amounts of scrap. If you look on Wikipedia, they have a whole series of articles on total quality management. There's Theory of Constraints, which we'll go through later, there's Six Sigma, there's Total Productive Maintenance. The General Motors Linden, New Jersey plant was producing several fractions of a percent or several percent of scrap. You'd really like to be down to a few parts per million of defects in your manufacturing process. We'll talk about the tools that people use to measure those things.