When a firm makes the decision to divest of a plant, management immediately begins to take actions to increase the perceived value of the asset. Just as an individual thoroughly cleans and details an automobile before putting it up for sale, plant owners want to make the plant look as good as possible to drive up the prospective buyer’s perceived value of the plant or to cover “warts” that suitors might view as liabilities – a practice commonly referred to as “window dressing.” Some of these window dressings can have an adverse impact on the reliability of the plant, thus reducing the plant’s true value, which, unfortunately, won’t be felt for months or years after you’ve bought the plant.

As many of us strive to improve the reliability of our plants, several comments bemoan how challenging that is to do in an era of continuous deep cost cutting. They say that in their operation, maintenance is seen as a cost, and is one of the first things to arbitrarily cut. Some think their operations have cut too far! What they seek is a way to justify a strong maintenance capability. I submit that one approach is to speak of maintenance as an “investment in capacity.” Use the language that plant managers, controllers and senior management understands: capital investment and return on investment (ROI).

The key to realizing greater savings from more informed management decisions is to predetermine the “True” cost of downtime for each profit center category. True downtime cost is a methodology of analyzing all cost factors associated with downtime, and using this information for cost justification and day to day management decisions. Most likely, this data is already being collected in your facility, and need only be consolidated and organized according to the true downtime cost guidelines.