Management often sees maintenance as a necessary evil — sometimes without much emphasis on the necessary part. Unfamiliar with the myriad types of maintenance actions on myriad types of equipment of varying importance, they tend to see maintenance as a single type of action. A maintenance electrician walks up, waves her magic screwdriver, and voila, maintenance has been performed. Let’s face it, maintenance of an 800A circuit breaker is not the same as maintenance of an auxiliary sump pump.

Thus, you get arbitrary cost savings decrees such as reduce the maintenance budget by 10%. Or, because you bought a new infrared camera last month, your request for a power analyzer this month gets turned down. In the administrative building, however, the same amount of money for new chairs, desks, and other furnishings was approved. This happened during a time when power quality-related failures are causing late shipments and order cancellations.

The solution is to quantify (in dollars, if possible) the risk involved in each failure, and identify the maintenance used to prevent such a failure.

For example, the branch circuits for three production lines are fed by a single feeder. Those lines produce a total of $9,000 per hour of revenue. The plant manager tells you this year’s annual maintenance shutdown window will be decreased from five days to three days. He tells you to be less granular, which translates into canceling the feeder cable testing (insulation resistance, leakage current, and other recommended tests). He assures you thermography during normal production time is sufficient.

However, thermography will not show you the condition of cable insulation. If this one feeder fails unexpectedly, what will happen? You’d have an unplanned feeder replacement to the tune of $9,000 an hour in lost revenue. The plant would pay a premium to get a testing firm on short notice to find any other cable time bombs while that cable is being replaced, or else another failure is just waiting to happen. That’s not just in the branch circuits for these three production lines, but in the feeders and branch circuits in all the other production lines.

If we use the same revenue figures across the remaining feeders, is the plant ready for four unplanned shutdowns at $9,000 an hour within the space of a few weeks? Is the plant manager prepared for the order cancellations that might follow a series of late shipments? How much business would be lost forever?

When the situation is put that way, the cost savings of skipping predictive and preventive maintenance doesn’t look so attractive. Maintenance isn’t a necessary evil; it’s what you do to reduce the risk that could put you out of business.