Maintenance Strategy

The amount of money spent each year by industrial businesses on plant maintenance (chemical plants, power plants, separate manufacturing units, etc.) ranges from 2% to more than 5% of the plant's replacement value. Labor accounts for around a third of the total maintenance cost. The way work is planned and executed has a big impact on labor costs.

When looking at the maintenance work that is done every day in factories around the world, one can see that it is often inefficient, that time is wasted, that various tasks are not properly coordinated, that work period is overestimated, that work plans are overestimated, and that it is thus "inflated" to cover up incompetence. All of this occurs because, as much progress is made to the productive (i.e. output) regions of factories, maintenance tends to be the area of efficiency in industrial organizations.

Maintenance work that is well planned and executed can provide a competitive advantage to businesses. Work that is efficient needs less effort and is of higher quality, which is reflected in the plant's reliability.

When machines fail, maintenance professionals are the “go-to” people. They are modern-day superheroes who can solve any problem at any time. When maintenance begins to function in a largely reactive manner, firefighting its way through the day, the role of the "hero" becomes apparent. Maintenance becomes a necessary evil at this point, as it is essentially a cost center that demands managerial attention and locks up capital (spare parts inventories) and staff. This feeling is worsened when maintenance is done “at any costs”: work orders take longer, cost more money, and need more effort to complete; budgets are cut.

exceeded, and the connection between upkeep and production is unhealthy. At this point, top management begins to examine cost-cutting options such as top-down cost savings (meaning less maintenance is performed, resulting in a risk of availability), partial or whole outsourcing, and so on. These solutions may provide a temporary solution, but they will not address the firefighting problem or the strained connection between maintenance and production. This can be aggravating since things return to their previous state. We offer a novel strategy to interrupt this vicious cycle. Maintenance, in our opinion, can be a source of profit by assuring high availability.

Companies with an efficient and successful maintenance function, as previously said, have a clear competitive edge. A maintenance function guarantees that all resources are committed to value-adding activities, removing process "waste" and allowing you to do more with the resources you already have.

A number of aspects must be in place in order to achieve maintenance: the interfaces between production and maintenance must be smooth throughout the whole maintenance process, and maintenance work must be correctly selected, prioritized, planned, scheduled, and carried out. Everyone involved in the process should be aware of how he or she may help.