Cut Maintenance Costs in Manufacturing with 4 Downtime-Reducing Strategies

For the past few years, maintenance leaders have been reporting a stubborn problem: the cost of manufacturing downtime is too high. 

In fact, all downtime is getting more expensive. And while avoiding downtime with preventive maintenance (PM) feels like the cure, too few facilities are succeeding on that front. Our most recent State of Industrial Maintenance report confirmed this. While 71% of teams reported that preventive maintenance was their main strategy, less than 35% said they spend a majority of their time on it.

If this sounds familiar, the problem isn’t you—it’s your PM program. In this article, we’ll outline where and how you can do more preventive maintenance (and make it more efficient) so you can actually lower the cost of downtime.

Key takeaways

• You need the right data to start optimizing any PM program. Make sure you understand your current cost of downtime, asset history and performance trends, and your team’s current processes before you even think about overhauling them.
• Focus on the 20% of your assets that account for 80% of failures (aka the 80/20 rule). You can identify these assets by pulling historical data, then ranking each asset by how often it fails (and how that failure impacts production)
• Auditing your PMs to eliminate or combine any redundant or unnecessary tasks can free up time for tasks that really matter.
• Finding and plugging efficiency leaks in your current PM processes will save both time and money.
• Empowering operators to perform routine checks and report anomalies can increase their engagement and reduce the pressure on your maintenance team.

First things first: Get the right data in order

An effective preventive maintenance program can’t exist without a foundation of information about your current state. 

Three metrics are absolutely critical to understand before you start planning your PM schedules. Let’s take a look at each of them:

Data point #1: Your current cost of downtime

If you can put actual numbers to your downtime (both planned and unplanned), you’ll be able to set a spending baseline, find inefficiencies, and track progress over time. 

How to calculate the cost of downtime

For each downtime event, you’ll need to combine labor costs, inventory costs, and production costs to find your total downtime cost. 

Once you have a concrete number, it’s harder to deny what needs to change. And much easier to understand how to make those changes.

Data point #2: Asset history and performance trends for your facility 

Taking the time to understand the assets in your facility can help you create a more accurate PM plan. You should be collecting data on:

Maintenance costs: Recording maintenance costs over time for each asset will help you spot trends and opportunities. If an asset’s costs are skyrocketing, it may be time to replace it or overhaul its PM schedule.

Upcoming production: Production schedules impact asset criticality and the likelihood of failure. Taking your facility’s production schedule into account will help you plan a PM schedule that’s minimally disruptive.

Asset history and criticality: Knowing how your assets have impacted downtime in the past can help you plan for the future. . For each asset, ask questions like:

• How does failure impact overall production and safety?
• How often does this asset fail?
• How long does it take to repair when this asset fails?

Answering these questions will help you uncover criticality and prioritize assets/activities that need attention.

Data point #3: Your team’s processes, workflows, and schedules

Assets are important, but if asset data is the only thing you’re looking at, you’re missing much of the information you need to cut manufacturing costs. 

Collecting data on your people and processes can help you optimize planned maintenance. This includes things like:

• Work order volume: What is your team up against every day? How much of it is reactive, and how much of it is planned? 
• Labor efficiency: How much time is actually spent on maintenance tasks compared to the tasks surrounding it, such as admin work, travel, or parts retrieval?
• Team skills: What certification and specializations are present on your team? Which tasks require certain technicians, and does that create any bottlenecks?
• Standard processes: What is the standard lifecycle of a work order in your facility? In other words, how is it typically received, prioritized, scheduled, and assigned? Could any part of this process be improved?
• Team challenges: What frustrates the people on your team? Ask them. If something is continually coming up, it’s probably impacting efficiency.

Four preventive strategies to reduce manufacturing maintenance costs

Once your data is in order, you can start putting cost-cutting PM strategies in place. Let’s take a look at each one. 

Strategy 1: Follow the 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule is simple: it assumes that 20% of your facility’s assets account for 80% of failures. Employing this strategy means focusing on PMs for the 20% of assets that produce the most frequent and critical failures.

To identify the assets that fall into that 20% group, do the following:

• Pull failure and cost data for the last 12 months. This should include the number of failures, downtime per event, repair costs, and parts used for each asset.
• Rank your assets by total impact. Using the data you pulled, you’ll rank each of your assets according to how much they impact your maintenance costs. This may feel like tedious work, but the top 20% will be easy to find from here.
• Analyze root causes and PM effectiveness. Once you’ve identified your 20%, go asset by asset and review past PMs and failures. Were the PMs performed at the right intervals? Did they include the right activities? Were they ever skipped, and did that contribute to failure?
• Adjust your PMs. Audit any PMs that are clearly not optimizing overall equipment effectiveness, then adjust them. This might mean increasing frequency, adding new inspections, or shifting resources from lower-risk assets. 
• Track, refine, and repeat. Once you adjust your PM strategy, watch it closely for a number of weeks. Did it result in fewer failures? Have your cost per failure or overall maintenance costs been reduced? If not, you may need to investigate further. 

Strategy 2: Audit your PMs

Finding the right balance of PMs can take time. Performing too many PMs can be just as damaging to your operations as not performing enough. 

Regularly auditing your PMs to eliminate any that are redundant or unnecessary can help cut down costs. Audit your PMs by:

• Collecting your full PM schedule. Make sure to include task name, frequency, assigned assets, estimated time, and responsible technician for each PM.
• Identifying high-frequency or overlapping tasks. Are any of these PMs scheduled on the same asset within a too-short time window? Do any seem repetitive? Highlight anything that looks like an anomaly so you can revisit it.
• Reviewing the effectiveness of tasks. For each PM, revisit what it’s supposed to achieve—and whether it’s actually achieving that goal. If you see any PMs that aren’t linked to a recent failure or a measurable benefit, flag them. 
• Consolidating, combining, or removing unnecessary PMs. Combine similar or redundant PMs into one single task. You can also try extending intervals on low-impact or low-failure assets. If any task doesn’t serve a clear purpose, cut it (at least for the time being). 
• Monitoring changes over time and reallocating resources if required. PM audits should be an ongoing activity. At least once a quarter, revisit your list of PMs with a critical eye. Should any of the PMs you eliminated be brought back? Should other tasks be eliminated? The answers will always be different, so your continued attention is critical. 

Strategy 3: Find efficiency leaks in your PM processes

There are many preventive tasks that can cause inefficiencies. Over time, these inefficiencies add up—both in labor time and maintenance costs. Here are the most common efficiency leaks that show up in PM processes, and how to fix them:

Strategy 4: Train operators to do select maintenance tasks

Maintenance tasks don’t have to be siloed within your maintenance team. Operators are familiar with the equipment they use, and with the right tools and training, they can be equipped to catch potential failures early.

To properly enable your operators to help with PMs:

• Identify tasks that can be operator-led. This could include performing visual inspections to spot potential leaks, wear, and vibration issues. It could also include training on things like basic lubrication, filter and celt checks, and cleaning tasks that are tied to performance or safety.
• Create simple, repeatable SOPs. Set up clear processes that your operators can easily access and follow using a mobile CMMS. Step-by-step checklists, photos or icons, and digital SOPs can all help create straightforward and easy-to-follow workflows.
• Train your operators. Empower operators by pairing them with techs for walkthroughs, building a QA layer that includes a mandatory operator sign-off, and setting up a process where they can flag failed inspections. Creating responsibility also creates ownership.

Optimizing preventive maintenance is just one way to reduce maintenance costs

We hope these strategies help you optimize your PM program to reduce maintenance costs and ultimately protect your company’s bottom line.  

As one maintenance manager at Cardinal Glass put it, “Maintenance is a cost. We don't make the product, we're not making the money, but if I can keep track of everything and make sure the machines are running, we've already made the money back.”

If you want to explore other cost saving strategies, download our ebook.