Three Maintenance Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make

In a typical company, executives and upper managers see maintenance as a necessary evil. While maintenance is certainly necessary, it is by no means evil. And when conducted properly, maintenance is an investment that produces a positive return just as surely as raw materials and production equipment are. Cutting back on maintenance might save money in the near term, but doing so starts reducing revenue just a smidgen past that near-time horizon. And it accelerates from there.

The first mistake on our list is one commonly made by maintenance managers.

1. Feed the cost bias misperception by focusing on cost reduction and budget begging

Rather than play this “ask for money” game, maintenance managers need to show the gain from adequate maintenance investment. Some examples:

• Rather than report on what maintenance consumes, report on the gain in revenue for each maintenance action or group of actions.
• Rather than ask for downtime to perform preventive maintenance (PM) or a repair, ask when production can schedule work to be performed to boost production volume or at least keep it from dropping.
• If sending someone to training will improve uptime, then figure out how much uptime you anticipate “generating” with that skill set. When you submit the expense request, show the math. Suppose it costs $2,500 with travel, lodging, and course fees to send a tech to training. However, you anticipate producing 18 additional hours of uptime in the same budget year on a machine that produces $3,000/hour of revenue. Under the old way, you are asking for $2,500. But this way, you are offering $54,000 minus a $2,500 fee. Which way do you think is more compelling?

2. Save money by lowering performance or reducing safety

Some spending is easy to reduce, so the temptation is to reduce it. Don’t give in to the temptation; consider the value of the expenditure. Some examples:

• A maintenance department “saved money” by skipping one water treatment cycle in the plant’s hot water system that fed various processes in the plant. The chemicals cost less than $30, but the damage was slightly over $17,000. Not an electrical problem, but a great example of foolish cost-savings.
• The plant controller noticed the maintenance department was buying a lot of test leads, so he told the plant engineer to get that under control. People were told not to be “so cavalier” about replacing test leads; spare leads were locked up in the parts cage, requiring an electrician to get a supervisor to sign a request to get a new set. You can guess what happened and why this policy was deep-sixed shortly thereafter. The controller showed incompetence by wasting time on such a trivial expense in the first place, and the plant engineer should not have propagated that incompetence into maintenance. If such things arise, don’t blindly comply. Kick the issue back up to management with the cost numbers and the safety risks, asking for a revisit of the issue.
• During PM or a repair, does your team stretch the life of marginal parts by leaving them in service? Or does your team reduce overall labor cost and eliminate a potential failure by replacing the marginal parts while they are right there anyhow?

3. Cut corners on technology investments

While it’s true that technology investments can be excessive for the need, the tendency is to make them inadequate for the need by cutting some corner or another.

• Purchasing or upgrading a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) but not sending people to school to learn how to use it. Typically, the result is a failure to use the most productive 80% of the CMMS.
• After discussing with a sales rep your particular situation and getting a recommendation of which model of thermographic camera to buy, you choose the one that is two models down so you can show how much money you saved. But how much costly downtime did this fail to prevent? This is not saving money; it’s buying failure. Never buy failure; it’s a lousy product.
• Compounding the previous error by not sending the intended user(s) to training. Actually, they should be sent before the purchase is made so they can advise on which camera best fits the maintenance department’s specific needs.

Always think of maintenance as a way of empowering production rather than as a drain on profits. This way of thinking has many benefits, one of which is it leads to actions that actually improve profits, sometimes dramatically.