A mill is roughly a hundred machines that all have to run at once. Every one of them will break. That part was never in question.
The question that actually costs you is the one that comes after: what broke last time, and what did we do about it?
At our mill that answer lived in three places. A paper logbook in the workshop, if it was still legible. A WhatsApp thread, four hundred messages ago. And somebody's memory — usually the person who transferred to another mill in March.
None of those can be searched. That is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is why I started building.
The thing I got wrong first
My first instinct was to build a system for recording work. Log the fault, assign it, close it. A ticketing system with a maintenance vocabulary.
That was wrong, and it took me a while to see why. Recording work tells you what your people did. It doesn't tell you anything about your machines. And the machine is the thing that stops production.
The change came when I stopped thinking of it as a work log and started thinking of it as a medical record.
Every machine should have a chart. You open it and you see what has gone wrong with this one, how often, and what was done — like a doctor pulling a patient's history before deciding anything.
Once you have that, something useful falls out for free. A screw press that used to fail every 38 days starts failing every 20. Nobody reported that — no single work order looks alarming. But the chart says it plainly, months before the machine strands you in the middle of a season.
The constraints came from the mill, not the code
Almost every decision that mattered came from how the work actually happens, not from anything technical.
Electrical faults have to go to a certified chargeman. That isn't a preference, it's competency, and the system should not let you assign it wrongly in the first place. So when a fault is tagged electrical, only chargemen appear. The mistake stops being possible rather than being caught later.
We work in pairs on hot jobs, for safety. So a job can be assigned to two people, and when it's assigned to one, that shows. I didn't build that to track anybody. If you're recording who did the work anyway, you may as well be able to answer whether the buddy system was followed.
And a technician will not use anything that takes more than a minute. That single fact killed more of my ideas than any technical limit did.
Building for people who didn't ask for an app
Twenty people use it now. Not one of them asked for it. That changes what you build.
It runs on the phones they already carry, because asking a fitter to install something through an app store is asking him not to bother. It's in Malay for the shop floor and English for the office, because the alternative is a system half the crew works around. Everyone logs in once and stays logged in, because a password prompt at 2am is a reason to write it on paper instead.
None of that is clever engineering. It is just paying attention to who is holding the phone.
What it's worth
Every maintenance argument eventually comes back to one number, and most mills have never actually put it on paper. Move the sliders to your plant: