Ok, good point. A better way to incent is to offer bounties for yield improvements. Most manufacturing outfits I've seen have those but they are probably too low.

Here's another problem mentioned in the article, in fact it's maybe the real problem: the engineers "who were already stretched too thin" probably didn't talk to their operators and technicians often enough. When I was a manufacturing engineer I noticed how much I learned about the stuff I was building by simply hanging around the operators for significant amounts of time. Not only did I get a lot of information about the subtle ways my systems were failing, I also learned that the operators generally felt engineering was ignoring their concerns. Just listening and trying to make the operators' life better earned me so much cooperation from the floor I later had no problems getting them to try out new things for me and providing me feedback on "improvements".