Recurring
Which fault have we now closed enough times that closing it again is the wrong move?
Labour spent on live causes
159 hours
in twelve months across 3 causes — about 4 working weeks of a three-technician shop
Every hour of it was invoiced, closed on time, and counted as good work.
On the desk this morning
6 jobs
already instances of a fault on this page, before anybody has picked up the phone today
Caused by us
1 of 4
9 closures across 3 customers, and seven of the nine found nothing wrong with the part
On the same list as the manufacturer's faults, deliberately. A separate page for our own would be read less often.
When a fault becomes a cause
- 1Five closures, across at least three customers. One customer with five is a machine, and it is dealt with as a machine.
- 2The clock is twelve months. A fault that ran for two seasons and stopped is history, not a cause.
- 3Every cause carries a status and a name — escalated, being worked off, ours, or closed. “Under investigation” is not a status.
- 4A cause stays on the page for a year after it is closed, with the call rate before and after, so that closing one has to survive being looked at.
- 5Nothing here changes how an individual ticket is handled today. The desk still gets somebody out; this decides what else happens.
Five and three were picked because they are roughly where a pattern stops being plausible as coincidence to the three people who would have to act on it. They are not a statistical threshold and are not presented as one.
The measure that hid this
Average time to close on the harness fault is two and a half hours and it has never once been missed. On every report this business has ever produced, it is the department’s best-performing category of work.
Fourteen customers have now had a combine stop mid-harvest for the same reason, several of them twice. Nothing in a time-to-close figure can express that, and nothing ever will.
Four causes · by labour consumed in twelve months
Header height sensor harness, S770 and S780
Escalated to the maker107 h · 41 closures × 2.6 h · 14 customers · since Aug 2024
The harness runs behind the feeder house and chafes on the casting. It fails in dust and heat, which is to say in harvest, which is to say when it costs the most.
Doing · Forty-one closures, fourteen customers, and it took two seasons to see it because every one of them was a good afternoon's work. Escalated to the manufacturer in June with the ticket numbers attached. Meanwhile: we now fit a sleeve at every service on those two models whether anybody asked or not, and we hold six harnesses.
Load cell drift on feed and TMR mixers
Ours28 h · 9 closures × 3.1 h · 3 customers · since Nov 2024
Three customers, nine calls, and in seven of them the cells were fine. They were installed on uneven pads by us, and they drift as the pad settles.
Doing · This one is ours. Installation checklist changed in April to require a levelled pad signed off before commissioning, and the three affected sites are being re-shimmed at our cost across the winter.
Display blanking, 2023 build tractors and sprayers
Known, being worked off24 h · 17 closures × 1.4 h · 9 customers · since Mar 2025
A firmware fault the manufacturer has acknowledged and fixed in a release nobody has installed, because installing it needs the machine at the dealership for half a day in the one season nobody will bring it in.
Doing · Being done at every service and at every other visit where the machine is standing anyway. Nine customers, and four of them have now had it done. This one will solve itself and it will take a year.
Oil cooler blockage, 9R series
Closed as a cause13 h · 12 closures × 1.1 h · 11 customers · since Jun 2023
Chaff packing the cooler on machines running in wheat stubble. Not a defect — a machine doing what it does in this county.
Doing · Closed as a cause. Eleven customers were shown how to blow it out in five minutes and the call rate went from about one a month to two in the last year. The remaining two were new customers who had not been shown.
The oil cooler entry is closed and is still here, with the call rate before and after. A cause that disappears the moment somebody marks it fixed is a cause nobody ever has to be right about — and this one was marked fixed twice before the number actually moved.