Chapter 2

It was four months later — early February — and the work on her teeth had been completed. Dacey looked at herself in the mirror and conceded that her appearance was exactly the way Dr. Matthews’ computer had shown it would be.

That had been a truly remarkable experience. Electronic pictures had been taken of her face and jaw and input into the computer. The doctor had played with the controls changing the size and position of teeth in tiny increments until the three of them found an image that fit the bill. Now for the first time in living memory, Dacey had beautiful brilliantly white teeth and a simply lovely smile.

However, over the intervening months, Dacey had been keeping herself busy; she was not the sort of person who could just veg out in front of the tube for hours at a time. She had used the time to go over the blueprints for all of Aerospace Technologies’ products ... and had been appalled.

In the first place, from a mechanical engineering point of view, they were a collection of Rube Goldberg machines. Somehow they got their respective jobs done, but in the clunkiest way possible. The result was that each contained two to three times more moving parts than were needed. This, in turn, resulted in the need for extensive maintenance and substantial downtime due to machine failure. Moreover, with the cost of the excess parts plus the additional time to assemble them all, the cost of the machines was far higher than it needed to be.

Initially, she couldn’t understand how such a thing could ever have happened. But then the answer came to her: It was the aerospace world at work. Although AT had intended to sell its machines to manufacturers of all kinds, the people all came from the aerospace world, a world of ones and twos; almost never were high-volume production runs achieved. As a result, the focus was on making something work essentially without regard to how the job got done.

Machine compatibility was another problem. Although many of the machines were designed to be used in series, there seemed to be utterly no rhyme nor reason to the various production rates. When Dacey set up a hypothetical production line using just six AT machines, the lowest common denominator, which would match the output of each of the sites to the input needs of the machines following, produced a mind-boggling number.

Putting the two elements together, Dace went to her computer, brought up CAD software and began to work. It took months of effort, but so did her jaw reconstruction. As it turned out, the two projects were completed at about the same time.

The results she had achieved even amazed Dacey herself. Overall, she had taken out more than 50 percent of the total number of parts and estimated that assembly time had been reduced by about two-thirds. Furthermore, machine input and output rates were now all multiples of 10. Almost regardless of a company’s needs, the new machines could be set up with no bottlenecks and almost no excess capacity either. Finally, even to her surprise, the precision of the machines was increased by a factor of about ten!

Having examined her appearance in the mirror as much as she could, Dace decided to take the bull by the horns. She would drive in to see George Morrison and Bill Miller, the two founders of Aerospace Technologies. Although it was February, the weather was quite warm so she wore a white sleeveless dress, frowning at her nothing chest as she did so. The comments made at her initial Clifford & Jamison meeting had never really registered and had certainly not been believed.

Getting into her BMW, she started it up and listened to the wonderful sound of its enormously powerful engine. To Dacey it was an almost sensual sensation. As she drove to the plant, she realized that her AT parking sticker had gone with her old Datsun so she had to park in a visitors space.

Marching up to the main entrance, she announced herself to the receptionist and asked to see Mr. Morrison and Mr. Miller, or either of them.

“Who shall I say is calling?” the receptionist asked, looking up at Dace with a smile.

“I’m Candace Kane,” Dacey replied with a warm smile of her own, “and I work here. Or I did, anyway.”

The brilliance of her smile coupled with her beauty almost knocked the poor girl flat. With a hard shake of her head, she regained control and made a call. “You may go right in,” she said. “They’re both in Mr. Morrison’s office.”

Both men rose as she entered the office and greeted her warmly. When she responded with another warm smile, the two executives were almost knocked flat.

Morrison, the chairman, was the first to recover. “Miss Kane, you are without question the most beautiful mechanical engineer in the world! Now what can we do for you?”

Dacey went to the coffee table sitting in front of a sofa and set up her laptop computer on it. As she did so, she noted that when she had entered the room, neither of the two executives seemed at all happy. Now with the two executives sitting side by side — Bill Miller was the president — she went through her findings and her full design presentation.

When it was finished the two men were utterly stunned. Miller was the first to regain his voice this time. “Miss Kane—”

“Dacey or Dace, please, Mr. Miller. One thing that’s changed is that I’m no longer Candy; I’ve never been able to stand the name.”

“And my name is Bill, and this is George, as you well know, Dace. Now tell us, what’s the cost implication of this?”

“Between savings on parts and labor, our costs should drop 60 to 70 percent,” she replied. “I don’t have enough information to refine the numbers, sir, but I’m quite certain we could cut our prices by 50% and substantially increase our margins at the same time.”