When something breaks on the production floor, wouldn’t it be nice if you could have everyone patiently wait while you remove the broken equipment, take it to the shop, and take your time to not only repair the obvious problem but to go through the system and bring everything up to “like new” condition? You may be surprised to learn there is a way to do that very thing, in many situations. Consider this example.
At a manufacturing plant, a critical line went down about four times each year due to the same problem. A mechanical gizmo would lose one of two bearings (left or right side). The electricians would perform lockout/tagout on the drive motor, then the mechanics would remove the gizmo and replace both bearings. The total repair time was about three hours, but nearly 80% of it involved tearing down the gizmo to get at those bearings and then rebuilding it once they were changed.
The solution was to buy a spare gizmo, and just swap whole units when a bearing failed. The bad gizmo was then repaired offline with no pressure from the production department.
