When any decision-maker refers to maintenance as “a necessary evil,” bad decisions get made. Yes, maintenance is necessary, but it’s not evil.
Those who say it’s a necessary evil want as little of it as possible, and they want to pay as little as possible for what they have. This can have profoundly bad repercussions not just for the maintenance department, but also for the production function that it supports. Not to mention such “minor” considerations as employee safety, environmental safety, and the proper functioning of critical infrastructure, such as fire protection systems, emergency lighting, and premise wiring.
People with this viewpoint see money going into maintenance, but they don’t get information back showing them the return on that investment. They see maintenance as pure overhead. From an accounting viewpoint, it is. But from an operational viewpoint, it’s not.
Remember The Matrix movie? You can think of the accounting viewpoint as the blue pill Orpheus is offering Neo. Take the blue pill, and go to sleep. When you wake up, you’ll still be in accounting land, disconnected from reality. Take the red pill, and you see how things really are. You’ll see how those maintenance dollars are directly connected to those revenue dollars coming in and those failure dollars not going out.
To “red pill” the decision-makers is not as hard as it may seem. One way to do this is to release a monthly report showing what maintenance did over the previous month and how much revenue was not lost because of that and how much repair cost didn’t occur because of that. You should have all or most of the data in your CMMS. Keep the report as a document in progress and update it with each significant event or evolution.
A significant “event” refers to an unusual occurrence. It would be something like “Predictive maintenance allowed early intervention of a serious problem (monetized). Or something like the new test equipment reduced troubleshooting and repair time by 60% (which works out to X dollars of revenue).”
A significant “evolution” refers to ongoing, regular maintenance. It would be something like “Consistent maintenance on this line prevents the following modes of failure (each monetized)”.
In either case, you are tying specific maintenance action to specific revenue made possible by that investment in maintenance.
Don’t fluff out the report to give it thud factor; that just obscures what’s important. Keep the report lean and focused. That said, you can enhance this report by including potential savings or revenue that were not realized due to insufficient investment in X. For example: “The company saved $5,000 by not sending Roger Smith and Christina Jones to vendor training on Machine B. With the training, they would have prevented a revenue loss of $98,000 this month along with repair costs of $2351.79.”
It’s not a bad idea to attach the last three months of this report to any capital funding request, unless you are told to stop doing that. This action further hammers home the value the maintenance department brings.
Once people can see the math, they can also see their personal careers rely on a strong, properly-funded maintenance department. When the plant consistently misses revenue targets or shipment dates, the plant manager is looking at unemployment. But if the same plant consistently hits its production goals while also consistently exceeding quality goals that same plant manager is on the short list for a promotion or at least a considerable pay raise. That kind of motivation can make a plant manager very supportive of maintenance and not very tolerant of those who refer to it as evil.
