Is your maintenance operation in trouble?

I have posted on this before, but I think it is worth while making the point again. There are several obvious signs when a maintenance organisation is in trouble.

I think this is important to review because it is often hard to see the wood for the trees when you are dealing with it every day.


When you ask people how their maintenance is, and they are not feeling defensive, they are often very harsh judges based on what they see from day to day. And measures like planned versus unplanned are not valid measures. (In fact they are misleading)

So these are a few obvious signs aside from the day to day grind of corrective and breakdown works.

1) Lots of daily inspections. By itself this is not a bad thing, but on closer inspection it is often a sign that a company is out of touch with their assets.

These generally end up being lists of tasks that could not possibly change state between one day and the next. The goal is to cover all the bases, the result is ignored task lists.

meaning the good stuff gets thrown out with the bad stuff.

2) Very small backlog. Counter-intuitive isn't it? You would think that if hey have a lot of corrective work then they should have a big maintenance backlog.

The reality is that they have totally spun out of control and are dedicated to fixing todays problems with no concern for tomorrows risks.

A sign of a company that has lost all confidence in their general maintenance processes.

3) Very little active management of their hidden failures. protective devices that are checked far too often or not at all, with no real understanding of why the duration has been set as it is.

This is often overlooked because you can mismanage this area for a long time without any significant consequences. But when it does have an impact they are often catastrophic.

4) Maintenance schedules are more of a wish list than a task list with no capacity scheduling in place at all.

Here the maintenance schedule is often a tick in the box instead of a focused activity list aimed at managing risk and performance.

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When trying to evaluate maintenance operations there is a tendency to look for benchmarking, or complex metrics or deep dive audits.

But if any one of these four core areas are showing signs of trouble, then it is likely that your company's maintenance approach needs a tune-up of some kind.

I hope this is helpful