The Reliability-Complexity Paradox
There is an interesting phenomenon occurring with modern equipment: two technicians with the same years of experience on the same type of equipment will still have relatively unique knowledge!
The reason for this is that decades of continuous reliability improvement have failure rates reduced pretty much to the level of “random failures”. Parts that fail too often get designed out of the system.
However, modern complex equipment such a high parts count that there is always something failing randomly.
The upshot is that the personal experience built up by each of these two technicians depends largely on what failed while he was on shift – and therefore each will have largely a different set of experiences.
Yet anything that every failed on that equipment has been diagnosed successfully by someone out there. This global scope of knowledge is a key part of an permanent and effective diagnostic system, and a SpotLight knowledgebase can do that.
©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.
Click for more examples...