No matter how quickly you do a repair, production is still down while the repair is being done. Yes, it’s good to improve repair efficiency through such things as training and kitting, but what if you could eliminate the need for the repair in the first place?
Every repair brings an opportunity to solve for the underlying cause and prevent a repeat. Yet, because production is down the repair crew is under pressure to “get the thing running” as quickly as is possible. In theory, solving for the root cause is a great idea. In practice, the repair crew seldom has the time.
Adding one more person to the mix can solve this problem. Assign a qualified repair tech to analyze the failure mode for an improvement that would provide prevention or early warning. For example, a critical motor overheated because of a dirty filter in its cooling air supply. A delta P sensor/alarm across the filter and a temperature sensor/alarm on the motor would work well here.
