A carpenter can only do so much with a broken hammer. Then again, if he has an endless supply of hammers, or a dedicated hammer repairman nearby, he might not be too bothered to care for them. Lift trucks, as critical to a distribution center as a hammer to a woodworker, were for a long time treated with similar disregard, expected only to swing hard, drive production, and be close at hand when needed. Today, few operations are content to pour money into equipment and its maintenance just for the sake of keeping it around; and unfortunately, few operations have any real sense of what it actually costs to do just that.
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