Eliminating needless effort is vital but hard

Case study: The fiberglass mat that almost killed an auto company

Elon Musk slept on a factory floor to solve a problem.

The Tesla production line was crawling. A robot was trying to glue fiberglass mats to battery packs, and it was frustratingly slow.

Teams worked overtime optimizing the robot. They sped up the glue application, refined the attachment process, squeezed out marginal improvements.

Still too slow.

Finally, …