Maintenance and Lost Profits

Production Losses

Are you maintaining healthy production volumes that meet targets and provide good profitability? So often the opposite is true. Diminishing production volumes cost organizations huge profit losses and quite often the root cause is ineffective maintenance.

Do you often feel like this poor fellow who seems to have a serious problem with his machine, just watching his dollars vanishing into thin air?

A typical result of no plan just fixes it when it breaks.

The result is going to be painful, inaccurate, and is going to be expensive due to repair costs and lost production.

No plan, no preventive maintenance. The consequences can be frightening.

Imagine you are driving your car and you hear a slight knocking from the front wheel. You have no time to investigate, so you just turn up the radio and the knocking goes away. ‘I will fix it tomorrow.

Guess what? Tomorrow comes and goes and you just enjoy the music, until late one night, traveling home on a lonely road the front of your car collapses.

Now from what originally was possibly simply a loose wheel nut that needed tightening, you have a multitude of problems. Possibly a damaged wheel shaft, bearings to be replaced, maybe a new tyre, not to mention a huge safety risk on a lonely road at night, and a large towing bill guaranteed.

The result of being Reactive instead of Proactive

Plant and Facilities

If we treat our assets in the same way as this poor fellow above has been treating his, then prepare for serious consequences and heavy costs! Rather apply the principle of Proactive maintenance and reap the benefits for your plant.

Good proactive maintenance practices will keep your plant and facilities healthy and in good condition to enable you to maximize production flows and volumes. Plan, look, and listen. You will be surprised how many issues can be dealt with simply and at minimal cost, which can result in huge savings both on maintenance expenditure and production volumes.

Reactive Fix when Needed

Reactive means repair when it fails and there are a bunch of things that can happen as consequences of being Reactive.

• Normally it is an emergency
• It is inconvenient and the wrong time
• Spares and skills are not freely available
• There will always be time pressure. Possibly in the middle of a huge critical production run. This often requires a temporary repair or quick fix to be done, which normally results in poor workmanship and long term cost implications.

I recall many years ago having a water leak in the kitchen. I was in a hurry so I did a quick fix and decided to sort it out properly later. Later came and went and I never did sort it out until on Christmas Morning I got up to a flooded kitchen. Not the best way to spend Christmas morning. I am sure most of us have stories like that.

It is also important to note that in an emergency breakdown situation, invariably nothing is recorded and zero information is established. No historical information provision for the future. If breakdowns and downtime are causing us nightmares, sleepless nights, loss of productivity and profitability, then we need to make a decision to move away from a Reactive mode towards a Proactive discipline.

Maintenance is not a cost center. Good proactive maintenance practices will minimize costly downtime, increase asset reliability, improve production volumes and be a huge contributor to bottom-line company profitability

We must remember that if we keep on doing what we have always done, then we will always get what we have always got.

If you are battling to maintain healthy production volumes that meet targets and provide good profitability and are just watching your dollars vanish into thin air, then change gears and mindsets and start a process to move towards a Proactive Maintenance environment.

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