What not planning maintenance costs you

The usual argument for rolling out a maintenance plan is that it prevents breakdowns. It’s true and it isn’t convincing, because you can’t verify it before doing it.

There’s a better argument, and it’s the opposite one: look at what you’re already paying for not having one. Those figures do exist, they’re in your invoices, and no vendor put them there.

Cost 1: the emergency markup

The same job costs different amounts depending on when it’s decided.

Scheduled: normal travel, a part ordered with lead time, downtime agreed with the right people, an available technician.

Urgent: immediate travel, a spare part with no lead time — or with rush shipping —, forced downtime, work done in a hurry, plus the other work that doesn’t get done that day.

How to calculate it: review last year’s invoices for unscheduled interventions. It’s almost always a bigger figure than anyone assumed, because it’s spread across many small invoices.

Cost 2: downtime

In many cases this far exceeds the cost of the repair itself, and it’s almost never charged to maintenance.

A stopped line is lost production. A blocked room is a night that doesn’t get sold. A broken fridge unit is product loss. An elevator out of service is workshop hours that don’t get billed.

How to calculate it: estimate the cost of an hour of downtime in your operation and multiply it by last year’s hours of unavailability. If you don’t have them logged, that’s already a finding in itself.

Cost 3: return visits and materials

Going back because a part was missing gets paid twice. And a spare part bought urgently costs more than one ordered with lead time.

On top of that there’s what doesn’t show: spare parts bought twice because nobody checked what was already on hand, and idle stock nobody counts as a cost.

How to calculate it: ask your technicians how many times a month they go back to a site for lack of materials. They know pretty precisely.

Cost 4: service life

The hardest to measure, and the biggest one in the long run. Wear that’s addressed in time doesn’t turn into a failure, and equipment that’s maintained lasts longer.

How to calculate it: you can’t, precisely, and we’re not going to make up a percentage. What you can do is start measuring it today: accumulated cost per asset, in the reports, builds the series that in two years will let you compare.

And one you pay without knowing it: warranty

Repairing equipment that was still under warranty. Nobody ever finds out, because to find out you’d need the date in front of you when you open the order.

How to calculate it: take a handful of last year’s repair invoices and compare them to the equipment’s purchase date. It shows up with an uncomfortable frequency.

The asset record carries its installation date, its cost and its warranty end date for exactly this reason.

What it takes for the plan to actually be followed

Having a plan isn’t enough: most companies have one and don’t follow it. What sustains it comes down to three things.

It has to generate orders, not reminders. Preventive maintenance creates work orders with an owner and a date, based on the checklist and frequency, checking holidays and availability first.

It has to get logged in the field. From the app, which works without coverage. If the technician notes it from memory, the plan looks like it’s being followed and the data isn’t worth anything.

What’s found has to turn into work. A checklist with minimum and maximum values logs the anomaly on the spot, and that anomaly has to end up as an incident with an owner.

The cost of over-planning

For the sake of honesty, because this equation has two sides and the second one almost never gets mentioned.

An oversized plan also costs money: technician hours on equipment that doesn’t need it, materials replaced before their time, and scheduled downtime that wasn’t needed. Almost every facility has both over-maintained equipment and equipment that breaks down between reviews.

The signal for the first case is clear: several cycles in a row with not a single anomaly detected. That doesn’t mean the review is working; it means it’s probably unnecessary.

That’s why the goal isn’t “review more,” but to review where things fail and stop reviewing where they don’t. And that can only be adjusted with a history, which is one more reason to start logging as soon as possible.

When wear depends on usage rather than time, there’s also a better path than adjusting the calendar: attach a counter to the asset with its limit and warning percentage, so the order gets generated once the threshold is crossed.

The math worth doing

Add up last year’s four costs — emergencies, downtime, repeat visits and warranty repairs paid for — and put them next to what the plan would cost: the hours of scheduled review plus the tool.

It doesn’t need to come out heavily in your favor. It’s enough for the figure on the left to be bigger than anyone assumed, which is usually what happens, for the conversation to change tone.

What you gain besides savings

There are two effects that aren’t about cost, and in many companies they weigh more heavily in the decision.

Being able to prove it. If there’s equipment subject to regulations or clients demanding proof, the plan stops being a matter of efficiency and becomes a matter of risk. Legal maintenance — which isn’t a module, but the same preventive mechanism using the checklist the regulation requires — rests on the order history, completed checklists and documentation with its dates.

No longer depending on one person. When what needs checking on each piece of equipment is written down by family, that knowledge stops leaving with whoever moves on. It’s the cost that gets calculated the least and is the hardest to fix afterward.

What not to promise

A savings percentage. That figure doesn’t exist, and quoting one from a brochure is the fastest way to lose credibility when someone asks you to justify it six months later.

What you can promise is that the four costs will become measurable, which is the requirement for reducing them.

Where to start

With critical assets, not the full inventory. With their checklists and frequency, within days there’s preventive maintenance being generated and orders closing with real data.

And with that, within a few months you have your own figures that make any brochure argument unnecessary.

And if you’d rather start without buying anything: write the list of your critical assets and, for each one, what’s done to it and how often. It’s the work that takes longest in any rollout, it’s worth the same with any tool, and it’s already a planned maintenance plan in itself, even if it lives on paper.

If you want to run the numbers on your own case, you can get in touch or request a demo.