Family Life

I tell you, it’s like watching grass grow.

I got in to work this morning to an email from a customer. A good customer. They were having a problem with their newest machine, and were producing 50% scrap. That’s a lot of manufactured products to be throwing out. They weren’t particularly worried about the bad parts they had to throw out. They were very worried about the good parts they weren’t making. Not meeting shipping schedules is dire. Just to reinforce how serious the problem was, the email had also been copied to my boss, to my boss’s boss, to my customer’s boss, to the plant manager, and to all the maintenance personnel.

So I phoned him up. “G’day. So how bad is your problem? Hmm. That bad, eh? Interested in fixing it over the phone?” And we launched into full diagnostic.

It was a simple problem, with a simple solution. I knew that from reading the initial email. Piece of cake. The machine is programmed to automatically correct for this sort of thing. I was somewhat mystified as to why they were stuck, because I had already trained them on this aspect of the machine. The mystery deepened as they explained what they had done so far in trying to fix the problem. They had done everything by the book, exactly as they were supposed to. So why wasn’t the problem fixed?

I was stumped. No more ideas, no more suggestions. I guess I’ll have to come and take a look at it. Big sigh! At ten o’clock on a Friday morning. It’s about a 3

This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 11:34 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.