The research poses the question: How can they design manufacturing systems, and in particular the process control technology, to make troubleshooting easier for the maintenance specialist. To answer the question, researchers focused on understanding how maintenance specialists acquire and use information during troubleshooting and the types of difficulties they encounter in doing this. The approach involved: (1) semi-structured interviews with expert troubleshooters; (2) field-based observation of plant-floor trouble-shooting episodes; and (3) a computer-based experiment to investigate the effects of hierarchical process controller display design on troubleshooting performance. Results include the development of a descriptive model of troubleshooting to use as a tool to help distinguish between different kinds of information utilization and different sources of difficulty. Insights into sources of troubleshooting difficulty are summarized and ways to alleviate sources of difficulty are recommended.