A complex gearbox system has a left and a right main drive gear. Because of an outdated controller, every six months or so one of these gears gets overloaded and strips out. It takes three hours to change the gear, but only 25 minutes to pull and replace the gearbox. Downtime runs about $400,000 an hour in revenue. You are fairly sure that a more responsive controller would keep the left and right side loads balanced, thus preventing the damage. But the production superintendent won’t sign off on that or a spare assembly.
To solve this problem, what should you do?
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