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If someone were to ask you what you were doing on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, chances are that you would be able to recall what happened in great and vivid detail. You’d remember who you were with, what you were thinking at the time, what you were feeling, and what you had planned to do.

On that morning, shortly after 9:00 a.m., I arrived at the corporate headquarters of a major tobacco company. This was also the location of their main cigarette manufacturing plant. Due to the events of the day, it was difficult to get much work done, so after a few meetings, I took a walk around the plant. It was fascinating to watch the entire operation. First, you had a rectangular room that had, what appeared to be, a long rectangular Lucite shaft, with conveyor belts, running along both walls at length of the room, high up in the air. At the far end of the room, the shafts turned 90 degrees along the back wall, angling down 45 degrees, and merging into a large receptacle. It was fascinating to watch the cigarettes coming through the shafts, and “pouring” from both sides of the wall into the large receptacle. From there, they were packaged into packs, then into cartons, then into boxes, all of them marching neatly, like good soldiers, down the assembly line. There were many similar production rooms in the plant.

This got me thinking, can you imagine what it must take to keep a plant like this running 24x7x365? What would happen if the assembly belt on one of the shafts broke? How about the machine that packaged the cigarettes into packs, or cartons? If something were to suddenly stop working, the entire production line (and no small amount of product) could get damaged. In order to prevent that from happening, there were frequent times when a manufacturing plant like this had to shut down for maintenance. During this time, they could inspect all of the equipment and replace any worn parts. Some parts may have been replaced during the scheduled maintenance window, regardless of its condition, because it was too critical for the operation and just impossible to tell when it would go bad.

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