Maintenance and the D Word

There is one word that grinds my gears when working with maintenance teams to lift their game.

The D word.

Deferred.

The premise that a business, from a financial or process viewpoint, can “defer” maintenance is not entirely unreasonable. We are in business to survive, and sometimes tough calls must be made. But ask yourself, how come the maintenance budget is the go-to for budget cuts or process priorities? Why doesn’t the baking company cut its budget for flour? Because without flour they cannot make their products. Make sense.

Sometimes, as in the case of KiwiRail and their track testing cars, maintenance is deferred because of lack of availability or resources. More often in industry, some process fubar results in maintenance windows slamming shut at the 11th hour. Same result. The plan doesn’t happen.

Don’t blame the accountants or production planners when they start deferring maintenance. They do it with impunity, because to them there is no effect, other than frantic squawking from engineers, running around with their hair on fire. Instead, blame the reckless ability to slash maintenance plans squarely at the feet of you, the engineers. If your maintenance plans are that loose and flowery that the business can continue to run the asset, your plan is poop.

If you don’t want to be treated like an amateur, stop acting like one.

Creating a professional, reasoned and bankable maintenance budget based on optimised PM plans means stepping away from FAT (fear and tradition) driven maintenance. This is entirely possible using your computerised maintenance management system, and in fact you should be able to produce rolling forecasts at push of a button.

If your maintenance plans are constantly derailed (no pun intended) by the D word, put your big boy pants on and look at your PM plans. Are your plans lunar based, (6 monthly, annual, etc) and traditional?

What is the provenance of the plan? Did it originate from a statutory, compliance or reliability origin? Or fear and reaction?

Have you ever reviewed the as-found results of the PM task and dared to optimise the PM task frequency based on these results?

Does your amount of PM tasks expand to fit the available shutdown window?

We have seen so examples of tribal maintenance planning, it is no wonder that the business learns to defer maintenance with impunity. One site was overhauling their major gearbox every annual shutdown out of fear, while identical operations were running the same gearbox for 22 years without ever having the covers off. Who is the fool?

A meat works was replacing their plate heat exchanger gaskets every shutdown. With two shutdowns a year, it was costing them $66k pa. Why? They had a leak once, (after 15 years’ service). Amateurs.

The good news is you can reverse the paradigm. We have worked with maintenance teams who have professionalised their planning and systems, gaining respect for their budgets and plans. PM tasks are optimised to “orange light status”, (like your fuel gauge – fill up now or start walking), and co-owned by Engineering and Production. Rolling forecasts drilled down from live data and actual PM tasks are fed into the budget, moving arguments from the boardroom to the workshop.

So, if your maintenance world is one of constant hurt and disappointment, fill the vacuum. Take what you do and redesign it, so the business sits up and acknowledges what you are doing. Create bankable PM plans that no-one would dare to defer.

It is achievable, it is a journey, but you can do it.