Today, you passed your 90-day trial period on your new job. You just left the plant engineer’s office.

She told you the plant used the same electrical testing firm for years, but four months before you started a different company performed the testing as a result of a corporate edict. “Corporate was happy with the 30% lower fee and the fact the testing took only two days instead of three,” she said. “I told them there is only so much juice in a lemon and something had to be missing.”

Corporate was further delighted when this firm produced a cost savings over the other one by submitting a much shorter punch list of items to fix and cables to replace. That’s what prompted her to hire someone for your position. “How can we determine what our vulnerabilities are?” she asked.

Your plant engineer is wise to explore that question. Start by listing all the tests normally performed and marking the ones recommended by industry standards, such as ANSI/NETA MTS-2019 Standard for Maintenance Testing Specifications for Electrical Power Equipment and Systems. A spreadsheet or CMMS report can be used for this purpose.

Now consult the new firm’s documentation to identify what its team omitted. You will likely find it omitted at least one-third of the recommended testing. And if it skimped that way, it probably failed to perform at least some of those tests correctly. The firm may have even overcharged for the work its team did, bringing the cost down by omitting work that should have been done.

It makes no sense to shut down for only partial testing; you still leave vulnerabilities, thus defeating the whole point of the shutdown.