4 ms·

When the possibly of losing $200k an hour with a line down even exists, "screw it, I'll have a few spares made" seems like it would be a less silly idea the pla

• Natsu 10y ago
  You'd think so and in some cases you'd be right, but plant managers can pick the strangest things to be tight about. I remember fighting to get some UPSes on important machines once upon a time. I don't remember going even one single summer without having a power outage. In fact, there were normally several per year.
• weavie 10y ago
  Surely if you could lose $200k an hour, you would want to ensure you have spares for absolutely everything already on site before the problems occur. Redundancy is an amazing thing.
  • bpizzi 10y ago
    It depends on whether we're speaking of turnover or profit. An average profit of 200K$/h for a single production line must be very rare (but it may exist). You're almost always not really 'loosing' 200K$ (otoh you'll surely be late in delivering your customers, and that may be valuable, think 'late delivering fees'). When you're 'only' earning an average 20K$/h (10% profit is an ok number I would say, but it may be far less if it's a common finished good), then it may have sens not to pursue buying couples of every single spare part you should have. The full price for always having in stock working spare parts for 100% of a 3M$ production line could be well in the tens of hundreds per month. At the end you're cutting your profit and that's the last thing you want to report to the board, as a plant manager.