Critical Thinking:
SpotLight embodies core aspects of “critical thinking”. SpotLight uses information from the physical senses when it is appropriate – touch, sound, smell, observation (but seldom taste!). It will ask about recent maintenance history when appropriate. It uses time, cost, and frequency of occurrence in its reasoning. Its knowledge is based predominantly on experience.
A SpotLight knowledgebase also includes solutions based purely on analysis when appropriate. For example, when a failure mode is anticipated but has not yet happened in the field, SpotLight solutions can be derived through analysis – the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis database being a prime source.
In particular, SpotLight is able to draw upon the global experience of a community of technicians in its critical thinking. There are abundant examples of experience-based Solutions in SpotLight knowledgebases that defy pure logic and analysis – complex combinations of time windows, operating sequences, prior environmental conditions, intermittency, design flaws, mis-configuration, maintenance error, and cross-system interactions. These are perplexing problems that were solved by someone’s stroke of genius, or by chance discovery of the cause. What they reveal upon reflection are the unsuspected influences of such factors on failure states.
©2008 CaseBank Technologies Inc.
In February 2000, an unusual brake problem grounded a British Airways Concorde flight from London to New York at a total cost to BA operations of over $800,000. The fault turned out to be a simple sensor failure. It took a whole day to troubleshoot, but the fix was simple and fast once they found the cause. Later, when a case history was forwarded to BA's commercial partner, Air France, BA was astonished by their reply: "We know - the same thing happened to us last year - we sent you a report on it".
The costly delay would have been avoided if the British Airways technician in London had been shown the story about Air France's experience when the problem symptoms first appeared. That's what the ADDS Service does.
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