A broken dishwasher probably shouldn’t make you rethink modern industry. But mine did.
With three young kids, our household routine is straightforward.
Dishes stack throughout the day, the dishwasher runs overnight, and by morning everything is clean, dry, and ready to go. Efficient, automated, and completely invisible, until the day I broke it.
What surprised me wasn’t the inconvenience. It was how quickly everything unravelled.
Without that single overnight cycle, every plate, mug, glass and pan suddenly became its own manual task. Wash. Dry. Put away. Repeat.
It felt less like a domestic setback and more like stepping backwards from automated manufacturing into hand-built production.
The Automation We Stop Noticing
Modern appliances have quietly trained us to think in systems. We naturally reach for technology as the default solution to almost any problem.
Need efficiency? Automate it. Need consistency? Digitise it. Need less effort? Add connectivity, sensors, and an app.
The dishwasher is actually a surprisingly good analogy for this mindset. Modern machines are engineered to run lights-off overnight, using optimised water and energy cycles while the household sleeps.
It is, in effect, lean manufacturing for domestic life, batch processing, reduced waste, and minimal labour input.
The problem is how invisible this becomes until the system fails.
Suddenly I was standing at the sink manually drying glasses, wondering how we had become so dependent on automation for something as fundamental as washing a plate.
Sound Familiar?
Manufacturing has followed exactly the same trajectory. Smart factories now depend on automation, predictive maintenance, IoT monitoring, and unattended overnight production to drive efficiency at scale.
The human role has shifted from execution to oversight, and that shift happened gradually enough that most businesses barely noticed it happening.
My kitchen had accidentally become a very small-scale Industry 4.0 experiment.
The Obvious Solution
After a few days of this deeply inefficient manual process, I did what any reasonable person would do.
I bought a new dishwasher.
This one comes with app-based controls, remote monitoring, and smart energy optimisation, because apparently the answer to over-reliance on technology is more technology.
And honestly? That instinct is not wrong. The question worth asking is not whether to automate, but whether you truly understand the system you are automating, and what happens when it stops.
At BrookConsult, that is exactly the kind of question we help manufacturers answer.
– Dom Brook
