In late May, Uptime Publisher Terrence O’Hanlon posted on LinkedIn that attendance at maintenance conferences has dropped significantly. Responses to his post offered plausible reasons, including budget constraints, lack of content, recurring content, and total saturation. While these are no doubt contributors, there may be one more growing reason for this decline: more and more organizations are finally recognizing that maintenance is not the source of their competitive or financial problems. This article provides proof for why this reason may be on point.

Lack of investment in maintenance could potentially have costly consequences. Besides safety risks, defects in power stations often result in cost-intensive remediation measures and temporary loss of power production. The ideal maintenance strategy is about applying the right measures at the right times. However, there are no silver bullets for power station maintenance.

Excessive heat in a manufacturing or warehouse environment has negative effects on workers, production levels and even the quality of produced or stored goods. This is a growing concern because today’s North American industries are being pressed hard to match offshore production options. Fortunately there are plant cooling solutions that can solve this problem.

So I think we need to say how good are we and how good can we be? One thing, for the people that are here that don’t know us, we have something called best practices and I’m going to show you that.  What we have done in our company, and you can do this by yourself, and it could be in a bit of a tough one but you can use this format…feel free. 

Decades of experience in manufacturing indicates that the reduction of operational risk and value generation is closely related through the culture on the work floor. Companies that succeed in creating a proactive risk culture can use their strength to focus on value generation, for example, in reliability or lean cultures.

Which costs are we interested in? Which cost is it that we’re really focused on targeting? That we’re saying as a team here. We’re doing a business case now. Which costs can we drive down through reliability? “All of them.” Agreed. Long term.