Considering reliability’s impact on a company’s success (keeping workers safe, preventing asset failure, and making maintenance costs more predictable), why do so many maintenance departments struggle to get executives to invest in reliability projects?
We chatted with Terrence O’Hanlon, CEO of the Reliability Leadership Institute, about his framework for linking reliability-centered maintenance initiatives to results that make leaders pay attention.
Watch the masterclass below, and then read on to learn how to put his advice into practice.
Key takeaways:
- Frame reliability as a profitability driver, and leadership will listen. You should know what every hour of unscheduled downtime costs your business.
- Balance quick wins and long-term vision to gain (and retain) executive buy-in. Show 90-day results while building ambitious multi-year plans.
- Treat your CMMS like an accounting system by logging everything, so you have the data to justify reliability investments over time.
Frame boardroom conversations around reliability debt
Too often, companies think about reliability only after disaster strikes. But Terrence emphasizes that teams shouldn’t wait until a costly breakdown, spill, or safety incident to start the reliability conversation. That’s how reliability debt (the compounded cost of neglecting equipment) builds up.
“Imagine buying a new car and not maintaining it for two years,” Terrence says. “Eventually, you’ll pay thousands to bring it back up to standard. That’s reliability debt.”
Every delayed inspection and skipped PM adds up until your organization has to “pay up” in the form of downtime, higher repair costs, lost production, or safety and compliance risks.
The debt concept is a powerful way to kick off conversations with executives about reliability initiatives. To use it effectively, you can:
1. Estimate the cost of inaction: Executives need to see what happens if nothing changes.
- Use real events: “Last year, a single unplanned failure on line 3 cost us $220,000 in lost production in just two days. Our current risk profile shows at least three similar assets in the same condition.”
- Paint a realistic worst-case scenario: “If our main ammonia compressor fails, we’re looking at up to $10M in combined costs between replacement, 10 days of lost production, contractor premiums, and regulatory penalties.”
- Include safety and compliance risk: “We have 27 inspections overdue on this equipment. A single incident here could result in shutdown orders or fines in the seven-figure range.”
2. Frame your plan as paying down that debt over time: Instead of asking for one-time spend, position your maintenance and reliability initiative like a structured repayment plan.
Here’s an example script for this: “We propose a $500,000 annual investment over the next three years to eliminate our current backlog and implement condition-based monitoring on our top 10 most critical assets. This will pay down our ‘reliability debt’ by reducing our estimated unplanned downtime risk by $3.5M per year and cutting emergency work by 40% within 24 months.”
By turning maintenance problems into a clear “debt” number with a concrete paydown plan, you make it easier for executives to see reliability as a smart financial decision.
3. Get finance on your side: Maintenance staff tend to speak in terms of uptime, PM completion, and vibration analysis. But executives tend to listen to measurements of profit and loss.
With that in mind, your pitches to leadership about maintenance and reliability investments will be more effective when you can pair every technical metric with a financial translation. Then, validate these numbers with your finance team. “When accounting signs off on your savings, no one will argue your ROI.”
Prepare for the “double work” phase
Don’t underestimate the value of setting realistic expectations for maintenance and reliability results with leadership. After all, you might not notice instant savings when transitioning from reactive to preventive maintenance. In reality, the transition may temporarily double your team’s workload.
As Terrance says, “For the first six months, you’ll be stacking proactive work on top of reactive work.”
It’s important to set this expectation early and help leaders see that short-term increases in workload or spend are part of the journey to long-term efficiency.
To prep, maintenance professionals should:
- Consider outsourcing reactive maintenance tasks temporarily so your maintenance team can focus on preventive maintenance efforts.
- Communicate to leadership that it will get worse before it gets better.
- Highlight that significant ROI typically appears within six to 12 months.
Play the long game, but don’t forget the short game
While reliability is a long-term transformative process, executives want to see evidence of results quickly. Terrance’s advice is to play both the 90-day game and the three-year game when it comes to your maintenance program's results.
“While you're waiting for those longer term results to come in, you have to have some strategies for the short-term results. Your bosses are all short-term.”
Here are some examples of quick-win reliability metrics you can use to build leadership trust and secure continued funding for reliability-centered maintenance initiatives:
- Air leak detection: Track the number of leaks fixed and the resulting drop in compressed air/energy usage. This often results in measurable savings within weeks.
- Steam trap audits: Measure how many failed traps you replace and estimate the recovered energy cost.
- Infrared or ultrasound inspections: These are great “show-and-tell” visuals. Quantify the number of issues caught before failure and tie them to avoided costs.
“Every other department is fighting for the same improvement dollars,” Terrence explains. “Reliability leaders have to compete by showing value early and often.”
Use criticality and CMMS data to inform your reliability roadmap
No plant has unlimited resources, so it’s important to start planning reliability-centered maintenance initiatives where equipment failure hurts most. The answer isn’t one-size-fits-all, so conduct a criticality analysis to identify assets that would cause production stoppages and safety risks if they failed.
Terrence likes criticality as a starting point because it gets people familiar with assets and talking to each other. During this exploration, you may find that records aren’t up to date, or that you don’t even have a centralized, accurate list of assets.
If that’s the case for your maintenance team, you’re not alone. Terrence estimates that fewer than 50% of companies log all their assets, parts, and work in their CMMS. But he advises maintenance leaders to enforce logging data in their CMMS the same way they would for an accounting system.
“Say you went into your accounting department and they said, ‘we're grabbing a good 60 percent of the deposits here. Or we’ve got a good 70 percent of the checks we're writing.’ You would say that’s meaningless and insist that they record it all. But for some reason, CMMS is the Wild West.”
In other words, everything (not just some things) should live in your CMMS. “It’s your QuickBooks for the business of maintenance,” he says.
These maintenance records will help you continue to make the case for reliability-centered maintenance investments as time goes on.
Building a reliability culture is a continuous process. If you’re looking for more on speaking your executives’ language to pitch maintenance investments, this five-step template is a good place to start.
Senior Content Writer, MaintainX
