Decide whether to repair or replace aging equipment
A side-by-side comparison of repairing, overhauling, or replacing equipment, using total cost, downtime, and risk.
The prompt
Help me decide whether to repair or replace a piece of equipment.
Equipment: [WHAT IT IS, AGE, EXPECTED LIFE]
Recent history: [breakdowns, downtime hours, repair costs over the last 1-3 years]
Repair option: [quoted cost, expected extra life, parts availability]
Replacement option(s): [cost, installation, lead time, efficiency or capacity gains]
Cost of downtime: [e.g. lost output per hour, overtime, customer penalties]
Other factors: [safety, compliance, energy use, operator skills, financing]
Analyze:
1. Total cost of each option over the same period (e.g. 5 years): purchase/repair, maintenance, energy, expected downtime cost, disposal or resale. Show assumptions in a table.
2. Trend: is the failure rate or repair cost rising? What does that suggest about the next 12-24 months?
3. Risk: what happens if we repair and it fails again at a bad time? Is there a safety or compliance risk in keeping it?
4. Non-cost factors: lead time, disruption during installation, capacity, spare parts becoming obsolete.
5. A recommendation with the main reason, and the conditions under which the other option would win (break-even points).
6. A short summary I can put in a capital request.
Use only my figures; mark gaps [ADD] and show where the decision is sensitive to an assumption. For financing or tax treatment, check with finance.
Highlighted [brackets] are blanks to replace with your own details.
Fill in the blanks and use this promptMore Thinking & Decisions prompts
What to fill in
- WHAT IT IS, AGE, EXPECTED LIFE
- quoted cost, expected extra life, parts availability
- cost, installation, lead time, efficiency or capacity gains
- e.g. lost output per hour, overtime, customer penalties
- safety, compliance, energy use, operator skills, financing
- ADD
How this prompt is built
This prompt follows the Few-Shot structure (Few-shot prompting). A few-shot prompt includes one or more worked examples of the input and the output you want, so the model can copy the pattern instead of guessing it.
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