A medium sized component manufacturer is running a mostly automated plant producing plastic components. There are plant operators, mostly semi-skilled, and there is a maintenance and breakdown department which responds to call-outs and their priority is to keep the plant running.
One of the maintenance team has a reputation for being able to get things running quickly and is really enthusiastic, and that means he is usually the one called out. Being so busy, he doesn’t have time to log what he’s done, so it’s a mystery to the rest of his team
In reality the same thing kept occurring, so he hadn’t fixed the problem, only the symptoms.
The Plant Manager could see this, and had some idea of what was happening, but was reluctant to address this out of concern for offending a genuinely valuable employee, but he was aware that it was becoming frustrating for all.
This is their story: