fbpx

Reliability Insights

3 Ways to find money in Maintenance

There is a common misconception that maintenance is nothing more than a ‘cost centre’.

What most organisations don’t realize is that there are big opportunities to increase a plant’s profitability through maintenance and reliability.

If you want to start improving your plant’s profitability, then there are 3 strategies you can implement:

The first is implementing Maintenance Planning & Scheduling.

The wrench time in a typical plant is around 30%.

This means out of 100 labour hours, only 30 hours are spent on the actual maintenance. The rest of the 70 hours is wasted doing unproductive work.

Not all of that unproductive work can be avoided, but a lot of the waste can certainly be reduced.

When you properly implement Planning and Scheduling, you can increase the productivity of your maintenance team by up to 35% without hiring new people.

This means that you get to do more work in less time using the same amount of labour.

In some organizations, this translates to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in cost reductions per year. That’s a straight benefit to your organisation’s bottom line.

Second, fixing defects forever rather than forever fixing them.

You might have heard the phrase “It’s broken again?!” a hundred times in your workplace.

We know from experience that some 80% of failures in a plant have happened before.

By eliminating these repeat failures, we reduce our material and labour costs. Imagine no longer going to the trouble of fixing that faulty equipment every three months.

Plus, Defect Elimination often leads to significant increases in uptime and therefore increases in revenue. (Read our eBook to find out more)

Lastly, is removing unnecessary tasks in your Preventive Maintenance Programs.

Doing more maintenance isn’t always valuable.

On the contrary, it’s doing more harm than good because it distracts you from the critical PM tasks that do matter. Not to mention all the labour hours and materials wasted on doing these tasks

In fact, studies show that 40% – 60% of our PM tasks add little to no value.

By removing these tasks, we reduce our costs and save time… giving us more space to do other improvement initiatives that do add value.

Now…

If you combine these three, just imagine how much you could increase your plant’s profitability.

You…

… Save time

… Increase productivity

… Reduce costs on labour and materials

… Improve production and revenue

All of which, will directly boost your plant’s bottom line.

But for you to see this opportunity in the first place, you’ll need to get past the vicious cycle of reactive maintenance.

You’ll need to remove wasted efforts and costs from your organization.

And THAT is the focus of the Road to Reliability Framework…

If you want to start bringing money into your plant through maintenance, then the first step is to create breathing room for your team to implement more improvements.

And you can do this by starting with effectively implementing Planning & Scheduling.

You can learn more about one of our Planning and Scheduling courses below.

SHARE THIS ON :

Can you see any opportunities in your plant that can increase your profitability?

Let us know in the comments. Maintenance is not all about costs. It’s also about driving increased profits through uptime and efficiency.

Related Articles

Reliability Insights

The Waddington Effect

Is doing more maintenance ‘good’?   It’s common to think so. I mean, it makes sense that the more maintenance you do… the less likely your

Learn More