Try telling a production manager, “We’d like you to forego $25,000 in revenue while we make a few more checks” and see how that turns out for you.
The “get it online now” mentality sets the equipment up for yet another unplanned downtime incident. It may occur an hour later, on the next shift, or a few weeks later. It’s usually seen as random bad luck, but the cause is really a bad, rushed repair.
Electrical contractors have a name for what happens when they install something and the owner calls them back to correct something: the callback. This situation is dreaded because the mobilization, transportation, and other costs not only eat up the profits from this particular job they divert resources from making profits on other jobs. The same cost situation exists with faulty production repairs, but perhaps orders of magnitude worse.
So there you are between the rock of production demands and the hard place of callbacks. In Part we’ll present a solution.