When things are going well early in the life of a plant, people in other departments don’t observe maintenance people scrambling from one emergency repair to another. Instead, they may see maintenance people “sitting around the shop” (actually, reading training material or reviewing maintenance data). Or they may see maintenance people “chatting with operators” (actually, learning how the equipment works). From this, they conclude that maintenance people need “greater utilization.” And that’s when the fun begins.
Project work starts getting dumped onto the maintenance department. To get it done, some PM work is “deferred,” and pretty soon the proverbial snowball starts rolling.
Fast-forward a couple of years and the maintenance department is now in a reactionary mode. The plant engineer talks about ending preventable failures by getting back to good preventive and predictive maintenance. But to do that would require more resources (not available), fewer breakdowns (not going to happen), or some breakdowns not repaired (politically dangerous).
Because it seems there are no good options, the plant engineer usually selects the worst option: continue in reactionary mode.
