So you’ve bought into the reliability-based maintenance concept lock, stock, and barrel and have developed a program that includes all of the key elements: planning and scheduling, predictive maintenance, and root-cause failure analysis. But that mountain of cash that all of the leading reliability pundits promised has yet to materialize. Worse, you’re spending more money than when you first started down the road to reliability.
Many organizations, disillusioned by the lack of progress toward their financial targets, end up cutting their fledgling reliability programs and go back to the reactive maintenance model. This ultimately keeps them from reaching best-in-class status in their marketplace. If you find your program in this situation, it might be because you made one crucial mistake: You didn’t follow the money.
Many reliability programs are what I’ll call technology-driven versus money-driven. Reliability leaders focus a great deal of their time and energy searching for the latest breakthrough technology and spend less time crunching numbers. We’ve all been guilty of looking for the “better-built mousetrap.” The problem with this approach is that no matter how technologically advanced the mousetrap is, you still have to place the trap in the right place to catch the mouse. And the mouse in our story is money.
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