In a heavy-equipment manufacturing company, each division also had its own design engineering function.

With all the reinvention, the number of parts the corporation had to make or buy skyrocketed. Some years later, an internal study found over 50,000 nuts and bolts in their parts catalog, many of which had the same functionality!

That same CEO-sponsored task-force found a dozen different electric motors with roughly the same specifications.

Costs of development, manufacturing, inventories, and support all went up.