In that kind of manufacturing environment, typically it's just middle management keeping things at a local maximum and hiding problems from plant managers. Midd

In that kind of manufacturing environment, typically it's just middle management keeping things at a local maximum and hiding problems from plant managers. Middle management is incentivized to maintain said local maximum based on some arbitrary metric (ie uptime) which can be decoupled from productivity. This is the primary mistake. Plant managers usually have the bigger picture in mind, but aren't aware of the issues, as they trust the people below them. Operators eventually stop complaining when nothing gets done, as they assume that's how it works. This leads to money spent fixing operator culture, which is really just a more visible symptom of the actual issue. Long story short, you get what you incentivize for. Incentivize carefully.