Mr. Fixit Visits Factoryland

My boss has paid for a consultant to give us some advice on efficiency (see: Cheatin’ Heart). I walked him around for two hours, explaining every procedure and practice in the Factory. In that two hours I had the installer call twice with problems, the painter decided to take his break in the middle of an urgent task that would only have taken him 5 minutes - but ended up delaying the truck, someone else came to me with a plan from the office that made no sense in some areas and was patently incorrect in others, a customer I had never heard of called to raise shit about some quote he was expecting and hadn’t received, and a supplier called to say the stuff I ordered 5 weeks ago was not coming today as promised but was, in fact, lost somewhere in the container port in Sydney.

And at the end of the two hours his only advice was we reduce the distance one of the machine operators has to walk.

Now the boss wants a report. Do I tell him he wasted his money (might just push him over the edge), or do I implement completely arbitrary and irrelevant procedures to make him happy, while continuing to fix things myself (risky if it goes wrong)?

I wonder what these 'consultants' make a year…