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Misguided Maintenance

Dec 21, 2009 3:49 PM

Over time, maintenance programs may become seriously "out of calibration" and consequently waste precious maintenance dollars. For example, some preventive maintenance (PM) procedures get "simplified" via dropping steps while others become bloated from "step creep." If the original reason for those dropped steps still exists, the PM is now inadequate. New steps and text of a bloated PM may have seemed helpful when added, but the overall effect is a PM that gets in its own way.

Take the following for example: A department manager complains about Line B reliability. To keep the peace, someone increases the PM frequency. However, if the cause is outside what the PM addresses (and it probably is), the increased frequency consumes resources and raises risk of human-caused failure while not fixing the problem about which the department manager complained.

One costly money saving idea is the "maintenance deferral." The idea here is that somehow it makes sense to save a buck on prevention so you can spend $100 on repairs. Deferral programs tend to get approval at companies that are under financial stress, as if downtime-induced revenue losses will somehow improve company finances. Prevent deferrals by publishing maintenance ROI figures on your company intranet.

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