Budgeting for Maintenance: A Behavior-Based Approach

Recently I was asked the question: “How much should I be spending on maintenance?” This question is easy to ask, less straightforward to answer, and much more complicated to understand. We all know it is equally bad business to spend too much as it is to spend too little on maintenance, but how much is just right? We also like to use convenient rules of thumb, defined as “a means of estimation made according to a rough and ready practical rule, not based on science or exact measurement.” This is often confused with benchmarking. However, benchmarking implies more exact measurement and the existence of at least some knowledge of underlying cause and effect relationship. To become the best, we must benchmark and learn from it. The question that naturally follows is: “What are appropriate benchmarks for maintenance costs?” All of us can use the tools and information readily available to calculate where our spending will be next year. But the most important question for a business regarding maintenance spending is not where will I be on my present course, but what should I be aiming for? What is the optimum spending level for my business? The following explains not only how you can evaluate, using benchmark data, where you are, but more importantly where you should be, and also give you some indication of how you can get there.

First you need to understand the factors that affect the optimum cost level for your business. The three factors that most significantly drive your maintenance cost at any time are your asset Life Cycle Cost strategy, planned asset utilization and your organization’s behaviors.

1) Your asset Life Cycle Cost strategy.

Are your assets being depleted over time (wasting assets), being maintained in a steady state and basically maintainable level (neither improving nor deteriorating and performance is at least acceptable), or are you having to restore your assets to a maintainable level due to a period of neglect or under-maintenance? If your assets are not at a steady-state, maintainable condition or do not have adequate replacement cost reserves built into the budget, for a short period of time your costs will be either in excess of or below a calculated standard value. Why a short period of time? If you are restoring abused or neglected assets, there is a planned end in sight to the restoration or replacement. Then steady-state maintenance takes over. Rebuilding an entire wasted plant is not in the scope of this discussion, but a new one certainly is. On the other hand, if you persist in under-maintaining your assets, then there is also an end in sight – the end of your business. It can be either a deliberate and planned business exit strategy, or it can be an unintentional way to go out of business. It is the end of your job, and your business too, when operating as a wasting asset is done repeatedly either unintentionally or as a way to force “the numbers to look good”. Let me repeat this: Wasting your assets is a business exit strategy, whether an intentional act or not. 2) Planned asset utilization also has a small impact on spending, however not as significant as you at first would think. In general if your facility falls within a typical industry level of planned utilization of 75% or better, then the method of calculating target costs we will discuss is valid. If your site runs in a campaign mode only six months per year or less and sits idle the remainder (as in some food processing plants and peaking power generation stations), then the results are a little different. Likewise if it is a “corner drug store” production operation with product lines that run sporadically at 50% or less utilization, (such as tolling operations and some seasonal products) the costs might be slightly lower. If a large asset group runs only half of the year, should the annual cost to maintain them in a non-wasting condition be one half? Certainly not! Many maintenance costs do not really go away just because the asset is idle, unless it is mothballed and placed in long term storage. If you intend to maintain your idle assets so that they do not deteriorate and are always ready for service on demand, the maintenance costs hardly go down at all. And if you do not maintain them while they are down, you will most certainly have to spend excess money to repair them when you try to put them back into service. There is some limited data to indicate that variable maintenance costs for a well-maintained idle asset are 30% of the running cost of the asset and fixed costs are not reduced. So utilization within a reasonable range has some, but not a dominant, impact on your optimum maintenance cost target. Poor utilization requirements can mask a wasting asset strategy for a while, but not indefinitely.

3) The overwhelmingly dominant factor in the cost of maintenance (as well as the other side of the coin, operational efficiency) is your organization’s behaviors and how they affect the adoption of best practices regarding reliability and maintenance.

Best practices are really a set of standardized, validated behaviors. For brevity we will just use the term “behaviors” going forward. What sort of behaviors drive cost down? Here’s a partial list of behaviors that have been documented time and time again:

A. The presence of the proper culture, which drives good decision making. Are you reactive or proactive?

B. The presence of effective and efficient PM and PdM programs.

C. Use of effective and efficient processes for identifying, planning, scheduling, and executing work and the CMMS system necessary to support them. If processes are ineffective or not used, the result is worse than not having them.

D. The presence of a strong partnership between the operations and maintenance organizations.

E. Good metrics are used to drive improvement, and are tied to performance management.

F. Solid and effective failure elimination and loss elimination programs are in place and functioning.

G. Good design practices based on life cycle cost, not just first cost, are standard practice.

H. Good operating procedures and standard practices exist that prevent unnecessary asset damage.

When looking at maintenance costs, the most important concept that you must remember is that your organization’s behaviors change the resulting cost numbers. Forcing the cost numbers will not change behavior. And in fact it is impossible to “force” the cost numbers (or reliability numbers for that matter) to change on a sustained basis without changing either the basic assets themselves or changing your behaviors. If you change the numbers but not your behaviors it will soon result in excessive cost, wasted assets, or unintended consequences for asset reliability levels. And inevitably the equilibrium will re-establish itself. However it might be under the direction of a new maintenance manager who has been given the mission to fix it at all costs. The take-away concept here is that cost is the dependent variable in the equation; behaviors are the independent variables.

In closing..

So rather than forcing the cost dollars to be what you want them to be (never a sustainable tactic), make your organization behaves as it should (largely proactive and with continuous improvement) and it will achieve and sustain not only the lowest cost for maintenance but also the highest OEE. That is right - the right behaviors reduce cost and increase production. Conversely the wrong behaviors increase cost and decrease production. So even if your business can afford to pay maintenance costs in excess of the “sweet spot” amount, you cannot long afford the accompanying low reliability that always goes hand in hand with such poor behaviors. I am sure that somewhere there is some remarkable situation that is the one exception that shifts the scale grossly and justifiably to the left or right, but I haven’t seen it yet. So I urge you, instead of looking for justification as to why your costs should be higher (or just being OK with higher costs), ask yourself: “What best practices or behaviors is my facility lacking such that I cannot deliver highest reliability at a cost around 2- 2?% of RAV per year?”