Unplanned Maintenance Kills The Budget

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Comments (6)

• I would agree that unplanned maintenance can kill a budget in a heartbeat. It also has several other effects such as the lowering of moral as a result of employees not being able to do "their own" job or tasks timely and is likely to affect incentive programs bassed upon meeting expense projections. On a company level, enough unplanned maintenance can cripple projected earnings and capital budget expeditures.
  
  Fortunately, there are solutions. More and more companies are turning to asset management programs that incorporate preventative maintenance modules. Preventive maintenance may not be the only tool used to address unplanned maintenance issues - but it will allow asset managers to mange their fires instead of constantly battling putting them out.
  
  Stuart <a href="http://www.mintek.com/products.aspx" rel="nofollow">

  1) Posted 12:01 pm, 23 October 2009 by Stuart Smith

• Maintenance planning must be based on the criteria of predictive maintenance, with our plans that we planned intervention of the machine, and thus avoid unplanned maintenance, which is costly and stressful, this through the predictive planning is to avoid these contingencies.

  2) Posted 8:36 am, 10 December 2009 by Julio Ballon

• Unplanned maintenance does cost in many ways. Maintenance plans should have a trigger, on-condition, time, or failure. Even failure can be planned for depending on the risk and consequence. In RCM the Run-to-Failure policy does not mean you do not plan for it.
  
  The problem with failure you have no control when it is going to occur. You can not have a scheduled plan but a ready plan.

  3) Posted 9:47 am, 10 December 2009 by Dale Magnuson

• While it is true that unplanned event can have disastrous impact on O&M budget, predicting it is equally challenging. If we can predict the unplanned event than it is no more an unplanned event!
  What could possibly done would be to classify assets and equipments based on their characteristics like criticality, type and usage etc. and find out mean time between different unplanned events for similar equipments that had occurred in past.
  Based on this frequencies and efforts spend during such event check if yu can avoid such event by updating maintenance strategy. If it updated strategies still remains run to fail than work out how many time similar event can occur in future based on factors like age of asset, time since last turn around, estimated utilization etc. Hopefully than you get some indicative figure for budget needed for such unplanned maintenance!!
  All this is theoretically possible if you have good amount of accurate historical data!!
  Companies that have good procedures will anyway need very small budget for unplanned events!!!

  4) Posted 9:55 am, 10 December 2009 by Hemant

• Planned maintenance is also much safer than unplanned maintenance.
  
  When you have as unplanned breakdown seems like you never have eveything needed to make the repair.

  5) Posted 7:22 am, 17 December 2009 by Wes Sheffield

• The original question/topic "unplanned maintenance kills the budget". There have been several good responses ranging from PM/PdM programs, to using simulation programs (to forecast these events), to sorting by equipment functional groups [I think this was by Hemant].
  If you think further about this topic we are discussing "How to reduce reactive Maintenance". Yes, I am linking the words "unplanned maintenance" to reactive maintenance. It is certainly true that proactive maintenance is less costly than reactive maintenance.
  With that said i think the answer is more involved.
  
  Although a PM program (setup & use) is important it has to be more than that. The goal here is to go after unplanned, unscheduled work, and also, any events which lead to additional O&M costs which could have been avoided. Can I underline that last sentence?
  Examples of avoidance are rework; working on the wrong asset; worker delays due to lack of materials; improper planning; improper work prioritzation; inaccurate CMMS data (such as job statuses); lack of failure/problem code history; performing self-imposed emergency work (wonder how often this happens?); no repair/replace criteria leading to extra repair/replace costs; no weekly schedule; no long range plan visibility; too much PM; incorrect PM tasks; PdM on non-critical equipment; no basic failure analysis; unnecessary expediting costs; safety viloations; workers hurt; no clear roles & responsibilities regarding use of the CMMS; no reviews of open maintenance backlog, or PM library or reactive maintenance or recurring failures; poor CMMS procedures; and no CMMS roadmap for continuous and sustained improvement.
  
  These are all costs which I call "Total Cost of Lost Opportunity" - and costs the budgeting folks may never know about (because we didn't tell them about it). They may be just looking at last years budget and adding 10%.

  6) Posted 4:18 pm, 14 February 2010 by John Reeve

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