Learn something new every time you visit
Internal maintenance employee cost: how much of the budget is your own people
A contractor-heavy maintenance strategy can look cost-effective on the surface, until someone adds up all the internal salaries, benefits and overheads running alongside it. A heavily insourced operation can look expensive, until you work out what...
Indirect maintenance personnel cost: what you spend on support versus hands-on work
A plant manager works down the maintenance budget line by line. The labour figure is large, but how much of it is craft workers turning spanners, and how much is supervisors, planners, analysts and clerks? The two groups behave quite differently, ...
Inactive stock: the dead weight on your storeroom shelves
Deep in the storeroom, behind the fast-moving shelves, sit rows of parts that have not moved since anyone can remember. Some were ordered for a machine that was replaced years ago. Others were bought in bulk and never fully used. They take up spac...
Idle time: the capacity you have already paid for but are not using
The compressor is in perfect working order. It passed its last inspection, the technician gave it a clean bill of health, and it could start this instant. Yet it has been sitting silent since Tuesday, because the process it feeds was shut down for...
The types of maintenance work, and why the labels matter
Two plants both report ten thousand hours of maintenance last month. One spent most of those hours catching problems before they bit; the other spent them fighting fires. The headline number is identical, but the stories could not be more differen...
The mean metrics: which one to reach for, and when
A pump keeps you up at night. Is the problem that it fails too often, or that it takes too long to fix when it does? Those are two completely different questions, and reaching for the wrong measure will send you chasing the wrong solution. The fam...
Proving the return on maintenance training
Every maintenance manager has heard the question, and dreaded it. You ask for budget to train the team, and management asks back: what is the return on this investment? Skill improvements feel real but are stubbornly hard to put in pounds or dolla...
Replacement asset value: the number that sits under so many others
Ask two plants what they spend on maintenance and one says four million, the other forty. The big number looks alarming, until you learn the second plant is ten times the size. Raw spending tells you almost nothing on its own; you need something t...
Overall equipment effectiveness: the three honest questions
A line manager proudly reports that the machine ran all shift. True enough. But it spent an hour crawling at half speed, and a tenth of what it made had to be scrapped. Running is not the same as performing well, and to judge a machine honestly yo...
Leading and lagging indicators: the scoreboard versus the steering wheel
The scoreboard at the end of a match tells you who won. It is honest, final and completely unchangeable. The steering wheel, by contrast, is what the driver uses during the race to influence where things end up. A plant needs both kinds of informa...
Availability, demystified
Availability sounds like the simplest word in the plant: was the asset available or not? Then you go looking for a definition and find half a dozen, each with its own formula, and the simple word suddenly feels slippery. The good news is that the ...
Direct to indirect maintenance personnel ratio: craft-heavy or top-heavy?
Every maintenance function needs two kinds of people: those doing the work and those enabling it. Too few enablers, and the craftspeople burn their day hunting parts, waiting on permits, and working from memory instead of a plan. Too many, and ove...
Craft worker to supervisor ratio: can your supervisors actually lead, or are they just outnumbered?
One supervisor, thirty-two craft workers. On paper the department is fully staffed. In practice, that supervisor spends the whole shift firefighting, never finds a minute to check quality, and has nothing left over for coaching or a safety walk.
Craft worker to planner ratio: is your planning function resourced or just overwhelmed?
The job gets called, the crew shows up, and then the waiting starts. The parts are not kitted. The permit is not ready. Nobody confirmed the scaffold. An hour of productive time evaporates before a single spanner turns.
Craft worker on shift ratio: a quiet gauge of how reliable your plant really is
Some maintenance workers follow the day shift and fill a structured schedule of planned work. Others are permanently rostered onto rotating shifts, their whole role built around being there when something breaks in the night or over a weekend.
Corrective maintenance hours: the share of your team's time spent firefighting
The crew finishes Friday tired. Ask the supervisor how the week went and the answer is "flat out". Ask what share of all that effort was planned work versus fire-fighting, and he pauses. He knows it leaned reactive, he just cannot put a number on ...
Corrective maintenance cost: the share of your budget spent reacting instead of preventing
A maintenance manager pulls the monthly report: labour, parts, contractors, the lot. What she cannot see at a glance is how much of it was planned, proactive work, and how much was the crew scrambling to drag broken equipment back to life. The tot...
Contractor hours: how much of the work your own team actually delivered
A maintenance manager reviews the monthly report and sees that contractor spend is up. She also knows a turnaround ran that month and three specialist contractors were on site for two weeks. But she cannot tell whether the increase reflects that s...
Contractor cost: how much of the budget walks out the door to outside firms
The budget review arrives and the maintenance manager is asked why the cost line is so high. There are several possible answers, but nobody can say at a glance how much was internal labour, how much was materials, and how much went straight out th...
Continuous improvement hours: time spent making things better, not just keeping them running
A reliability engineer spends three hours a week reviewing failure data and looking for patterns. A supervisor joins a two-hour fishbone session after a safety incident. A planner gives a morning to a lean project on planning accuracy. None of tho...
Condition-based maintenance hours: the team's time spent catching failures early
Two technicians spend Tuesday morning running thermal imaging routes across the switchgear and motor control centres. Another takes vibration readings on the critical pumps while a fourth draws oil samples from the big gearboxes. Not one of them t...
Condition-based maintenance cost: what it costs to listen to your equipment
A vibration analyst walks the floor with a data collector, touching sensor points on pumps and motors. An oil sampler draws fluid from gearboxes on a set route. A thermographer sweeps a camera across the switchgear. Not one of them repairs a thing...
Availability: when you needed the asset, was it actually there?
The shift handover report says the line went down twice this week. One was a planned service that took an hour. The other was a coupling that let go without warning and pulled the machine out for most of a morning. Standing at the door, both look ...
Asset value per maintenance worker: how much plant each technician keeps alive
Two plants in the same industry, making more or less the same thing. One runs lean: every tradesperson has a full day's work, and the planning board is run like a railway timetable. The other carries a crew that simply feels right, the headcount i...
Repeat Equipment Failures: How to Find What the First Fix Missed
The same bearing goes for the third time this year. A failure that keeps coming back is telling you the first answer was incomplete, and it usually fails in one of four ways.
Root Cause Analysis: A Short Method for When There Is No Time for the Long One
Formal root cause analysis needs a room, a facilitator and half a day. Most failures never clear that bar, so they get fixed, closed and repeated. Here is a twenty minute version.
Shutdown and Turnaround Planning: What to Do Twelve Months Out
Turnarounds rarely fail during the turnaround. They fail months earlier, in a meeting where somebody said we will sort that out nearer the time.
Maintenance Backlog Management: How to Read Yours and What to Do About It
Four hundred open jobs could mean a healthy plant or one that has given up closing anything. The size tells you little. Sort by age and the picture changes completely.
Weekly Maintenance Scheduling Meeting: How to Run One That Is Worth the Time
This meeting exists to commit to a week and agree what gets dropped. Four questions get you there in thirty minutes. Everything else in the room is a different meeting wearing this one's clothes.
Maintenance Job Plans: How to Write One a Technician Will Be Glad to Get
Ask your crew what they do with your job plans. If they glance at the parts list and work out the rest themselves, the plans are written for the file rather than the person doing the job.
Maintenance Planning vs Scheduling: What Each Role Actually Does
Planning answers what and how. Scheduling answers when and who. When one person does both under pressure, scheduling always wins and the planning quietly disappears.
Maintenance Planner Productivity: What Fills the Week and How to Win Time Back
Six in ten maintenance leaders say their planners spend less than a third of their time planning. The rest goes somewhere specific, and most of it is fixable.
Reliability Programme Rollout: Why the First Six Months Feel Slower
Six months in, the team is working harder and the numbers look worse. Both are usually true, and neither means the programme is failing. Here is what is happening underneath.
Multi-Site Maintenance Standardisation: How to Do It Without Losing Local Knowledge
When five sites do the same job differently, some of that is drift and some of it is knowledge. From head office they look identical. Here is how to tell them apart before you standardise.
Operations and Maintenance: How to Agree a Shutdown Window Without a Fight
The shutdown argument is not really about the machine. It is about two teams being measured over different lengths of time. Here is how to give both of them something they can read.
Maintenance Improvement Programmes: How to Keep One Alive Past Month Four
Most improvement programmes do not fail. They go quiet around month four, when the effort is real and the results are not visible yet. Here is how to get a team across that gap.
Vendor managed inventory: handing the routine restocking to your suppliers
A storeroom clerk spends half her week reordering nuts, bolts, cable ties and lubricants. She counts them, raises purchase orders, chases deliveries and puts them away. Every hour on that is an hour not spent cycle-counting, rationalising duplicat...
Work order aging: the backlog you stop seeing
Pull up the active work order list and sort it by creation date. Somewhere near the bottom you will find orders raised six months ago, a year ago, some older still. Nobody cancelled them. Nobody finished them. They just aged, quietly, while newer ...
Work order cycle time: how long a job really takes, from request to closed
A work order is raised on a Monday in July for a minor gearbox inspection. It sits in the planner's queue, then waits for a part, then waits for a scheduled slot, and finally gets done in December.
Wrench time: how much of the paid day actually reaches the tools
Follow a skilled technician through a normal shift. She clocks in, waits for her assignment, walks to the storeroom, finds the part was never staged, walks back for a permit, waits for the equipment to be locked out, and finally picks up a tool we...
Industry 4.0 Training Lifts Maintenance at Canadian Mining Company
Industry 4.0 training strengthened maintenance practices and asset management skills at a Canadian mining company, improving communication between technical teams and leadership for safer, more efficient operations.
Elevating Technical Expertise in an Automotive Manufacturer
A targeted training program boosted technician skills in maintenance and safety, improving uptime, morale, and operational efficiency. The approach led to better safety compliance, reduced turnover, and more reliable production.
Targeted Training Strengthens Safety at Uranium Producer
Targeted maintenance training at a uranium producer improved resource control and safety discipline, enabling smoother Industry 4.0 technology adoption and clearer operational planning.
