In my working days I was responsible for a fairly substantial fleet of diesel electric locomotives, including their overhaul and repair. Not the same as steam, but to some extent machinery is machinery.
One of the challenges we faced was that the cost of repair work was dictated by the machinery, not by what we could afford to spend. Estimates could be made, but what really needed to be done was never known until a unit was torn down and actual repairs begun. And even after you knew what was needed, the result was usually a range of options from minimum to maximum cost with a bunch of complex mechanical and economic tradeoffs attached (marketability, reliability, future repair costs, shop productivity, etc.). Sometimes the machinery forced you to spend more than had been budgeted based on the estimate, or alternatively to scrap the project. Once you learned the game you usually built significant contingency costs into estimates (and budgets), since in the world of used machinery surprises were almost universally bad news.
I was an operating and finance person not a mechanical person. One of the things I was forced to learn was to listen closely to what my chief mechanical officer was telling me. A whole lot of judgment was involved, a lot of which was outside my expertise. I had to trust and rely on the judgment of my CMO to tell me what was realistically possible in terms of the machinery and shop, he had to trust and rely on me to tell him what the funding and economic alternatives were. Decisions were made jointly. Sometimes the only alternatives were to either invest more money or abandon the project. You did the best you could with shop productivity. And the machinery did not respond well to dictates that we didn’t have enough money.
Managing such a business is difficult because typically the guy with the money isn’t the guy who has the mechanical knowledge to determine how much money is needed. The alternatives are complex, and sometimes all the alternatives are unpleasant. The two skill sets have learn to work together and have confidence in the judgment of the other. If those two very different skill sets can’t work together, you need a change in management.
In my case, I was very lucky to have a good CMO, he saved my ass. And vice versa. The C&TS appears to have a major cost over run problem, but to the extent it is related to the locomotives, the fault might lie with the machinery not with the management. The answer to that will most likely require a lot of judgement and even trust. Hopefully the C&TS can sort through these issues successfully.
(Sorry for all the edits, but proof reading has never been one of my strengths.)
JBWX
Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2010 02:34PM by John West.
