The contract promised capability uplift and a three-month knowledge transfer. Six months later the internal maintenance planners still route every non-standard fault through the vendor portal because the new role descriptions removed authority to approve fixes on site.
Your ops director sees the same pattern repeat across planning, procurement and field supervision. Each redesigned position now carries a mandatory escalation step that did not exist before the vendor arrived.
The fatigue shows up in exit interviews. People who once diagnosed compressor failures or renegotiated supplier terms now describe their job as updating tickets and waiting for external sign-off.
The vendor measures success by the number of completed workshops and updated RACI charts. No metric tracks how many decisions have moved outside the building or how long it takes an internal person to regain the right to act.
Procurement locked the arrangement into fixed milestones that pay out only when the new org chart and training records are delivered. Adjustments to restore real decision rights trigger variation pricing.
The remaining senior technicians have started documenting workarounds on personal notebooks again. They learned from the last cycle that the next redesign will wipe the shared systems clean.
Leadership still talks about embedding skills. The actual effect is that every experienced person now treats the vendor script as the safe default and treats initiative as career risk.