Case Study: No Matter What You Do, You’re Wrong
The most visible part of a Team Lead’s job is preparing the weekly maintenance schedules. These schedules are required to be prepared at last two weeks in advance of the week they’re for, and based on developed maintenance requirements for each piece of manufacturing equipment.
For this particular task, your maintenance requires shutting down part of a production line so a piece of equipment can be taken off-line for approximately two hours. In addition, the maintenance requires replacing some parts. This maintenance also requires the use of a particular piece of test equipment, which you only have one of, and only two of your team members are trained on the use of this test equipment. Knowing the high-visibility nature of this job, you spend extra time planning it out.
You order the parts well in advance and they arrive two days prior to the maintenance task. Your two key workers are scheduled to be on-duty during those hours, and they are familiar with the task.
You coordinate the production line shutdown with the appropriate production managers. The managers are nervous about this shutdown as they are already behind their production schedules. If your maintenance takes more than the allotted two hours they might not be able to make-up their production quotas. Since a line shutdown means assembly-line workers are not able to perform their duties, work schedules are arranged so all workers on that line will be off-the-books during those two hours not drawing any wages. You assure the managers you have everything under control and the line will be down no more than the two scheduled hours.
You’ve double-checked everything, and are confident this will be a smooth maintenance task. What could possibly go wrong?
The day of the planned maintenance one of your two key workers calls in sick. You grab another worker who claims to be able to do the job, even though they never have. As part of their preparation they setup the special test equipment to become familiar with it, and manage to break it. Meanwhile, the other worker who is familiar with the job opens up the packages containing the ordered parts and discovers the parts department ordered the wrong items. What you have will not work and the items have to be reordered.
The down-time has already been scheduled and since the assembly line workers are scheduled to be off, it’s too late to cancel the down-time. After nearly three weeks of meticulous planning, the production line is shut down for two hours without the maintenance being performed. The production managers are furious – at you. They tell you in no uncertain terms that you aren’t going to get another shutdown for at least three months when they expect to be back on quota. This means you will miss a required maintenance task which puts the equipment in a degraded status, which requires a report being filed with the factory’s Chief Engineer.
What should you have done differently?
Download and review these files to help with your case study analysis.
Team members Work Schedules
Machine Maintenance Requirements
Purchase Orders
Emails With Department Heads Requesting Down-time
Use this report form for explaining your budget requests.
Upon submitting, this report will be sent to your Coach for evaluation.
