How Maintenance Teams Can Reduce Production Costs and Material Waste in 2025

Most maintenance, reliability, and operations (MRO) leaders would agree: the key to reducing high production costs and waste is to improve their maintenance operations. Yet, this goal continues to stay out of reach for too many teams. Why? They can’t get out of the loop of firefighting. Despite good intentions, more urgent problems keep coming up. These problems make production costs and operational waste skyrocket.

This isn’t a simple cause-and-effect relationship. Inefficient maintenance is the result of a number of factors that combine to complicate operations. Factors like:

• Inefficient workflows
• Poor inventory management
• Staying stuck in reactive maintenance patterns
• Not using technology that automates processes and workflows
• Poor training/knowledge sharing/skill building

The good news? There are tangible ways you can reduce or eliminate the impact of these factors and drive down production costs and waste. 

Key takeaways

• Evaluate your current workflows to identify activities that aren’t adding value
• Optimize inventory management to eliminate work stoppages and high emergency shipping costs due to missing parts
• Prevent equipment failure by adopting condition-based or predictive maintenance strategies
• Implement a CMMS to significantly reduce labor hours spent of repetitive tasks
• Focus on training—and documenting expert knowledge—so that frontline workers know how to spot and reduce inefficiencies 

Step 1: Evaluate your current workflows

Before you can reduce costs, you need to figure out how they got so high in the first place. Start by evaluating your current workflows to understand and reduce activities that aren’t creating value. This is a two-step process:

• Study past work orders. Take a deep dive into the hard data. Where is your maintenance team spending their time? Which activities keep coming up? Are there patterns clearly getting in the way of efficiency, like parts or labor shortages or unexpected frequent breakdowns?

• Consult your frontline workers. Talking to the people on the floor gives valuable context to your data. It’s important to talk to your frontline workers about their experiences. What frustrates them? Which tasks are they getting stuck on? What do they wish was better? Most importantly, is everyone on the same page about process? If everyone has a different answer for how work orders should be created and completed, you’re facing a clear process problem.

Let's say, for example, that an investigation of work orders reveals that issues with machine start-ups accounted for 20% of all unplanned downtime in the last three months. Using this information, you can invest a little extra time on pre-startup inspections and adjustments to improve clean startups while reducing rework.

Whichever patterns you uncover, know that you’re not alone in them. This year’s State of Industrial Maintenance report showed that 58% of facilities dedicate less than half of their maintenance time to planned maintenance work (planned being the keyword here), and only 13% of facilities spend most of their time on planned preventive tasks. But understanding where your team’s precious time is going is an important first step in starting to get that time back.

Step 2: Optimize your inventory 

Poor inventory management puts you on a fast track to high production costs. When you don’t have the right parts ready at the right time, you’ll delay fixes, interrupt production, and often end up paying unnecessary fees on emergency shipping. 

A proper inventory management system will help you reverse course just as easily. In fact, 58.9% of survey respondents who reduced downtime costs last year did so by overhauling their inventory management. 

We’ve covered the Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain process to cleaning up your parts inventory before, and if you’re starting with a storeroom that hasn’t been organized in years, this is a great place to start. Taking the time to catalog and clean up your inventory, getting rid of parts that haven’t been used in an excessive amount of time or that are clearly not the right fit for your current machinery, puts you in a much better position going forward.

But continued results require continued effort, which is why the last step in that process is the most important. Sustaining your inventory management efforts is the only way you’ll continue to drive costs down. 

Introducing a tool—like a CMMS—that allows you to build a database of parts and tie them to work orders can be transformative in helping you understand and drive down costs. Let’s say you’ve completed an entire overhaul of your storeroom. As soon as you use one of those parts, that record you spent so many hours creating is out of date. But digitally recording each part so it can be tied to work orders (and send a notification when stock is low) will allow you to easily stay on top of inventory going forward.

Step 3: Consider condition-based and predictive maintenance technologies

We all know that downtime is expensive. And while many facilities are finding ways to reduce it, our survey results show that downtime costs continue to rise. Over the last year, 31% of respondents saw their downtime costs increase, and only 20% saw a decrease in the cost of unplanned downtime.

It stands to reason that the surest way to avoid high downtime costs is to avoid downtime altogether. Implementing a preventive maintenance program is a good start, but moving towards more mature maintenance models can prevent equipment failure long before it poses a downtime risk. 

Condition-based maintenance, which uses real-time machine data to analyze equipment health, and predictive maintenance, which uses data analytics and machine learning to forecast failures, are two approaches that aim to do this. Both strategies are becoming more common. The 2025 State of Industrial Maintenance survey found that nearly a third of respondents are already using sensors and IIoT devices to monitor their critical equipment.

Let’s look at an example: a facility has one piece of equipment that continually overheats. The condition-based maintenance solution would be to install an infrared camera to detect any changes and alert frontline workers when that equipment is about to overheat. The predictive approach is a little different. Here, you’d establish an acceptable temperature baseline, then install an IoT sensor that will, based on historical data, try to predict when the equipment is at risk of overheating and send an alert.

Of course, maintenance maturity exists on a spectrum. If you’re currently stuck in a loop of reactive maintenance, it doesn’t make sense to jump straight to predictive efforts. Anything you can do to mature your maintenance efforts—whether it’s adopting a CMMS to get better utility out of your machine data, or using that data to build a PM program—will help you avoid downtime.

Step 4: Integrate technology that can automate repetitive tasks 

Establishing inventory management and maintenance programs is important work, and it often feels like a lot of work. But once those programs are in place, you can get to the fun part of finding efficiencies. 

This is the key to continued success. Most people won’t enthusiastically adopt a new system unless they’re convinced it will make their life easier. When you find the right CMMS, you’ll be able to do that in a number of ways that benefit both your workers and your bottom line. 

The Public Works Department of the Cayman Islands saw this firsthand when they adopted MaintainX. While their main purpose for adopting a CMMS was to digitize a paper-based maintenance system, they’ve also found that their monthly reporting, which used to take hours, is now a two-click, minute-long endeavor. 

It’s those kinds of efficiencies that transform the way maintenance teams work. A CMMS that helps you automate, and even eliminate, repetitive tasks can transform how your team spends its time. When you can create SOPs and digital checklists in an instant using just a photo, file, or speech-to-text, your frontline workers will be freed up to focus on more important, less repetitive work.  

Step 5: Focus on training

Even with the most cutting-edge technology on your side, your people will always be your strongest defense against rising costs. Above all else, your maintenance team has to be good at what they do. Making sure your staff are well trained on processes, best practices, and seeking out efficiencies will ensure your frontline is always doing what it can to avoid rising costs and waste.

It’s also critical to document institutional knowledge, otherwise all the training you’ve worked so hard to invest in will disappear the moment your most knowledgeable and experienced staff retire. Ahlstrom’s maintenance team knows this all too well—before finding a CMMS, they would have to wait to schedule certain tasks for days when their most experienced technicians would be on site. As soon as they implemented MaintainX, that hurdle disappeared, freeing up hours of labor and democratizing access to that knowledge.

Perhaps the ultimate win is when you can use CMMS insights to improve training processes. For example, response time data from work orders can show you exactly where your team is struggling. Using that data, you can tailor your training plan to focus on proper prioritization. 

With the right system in place, you can easily capture machine data, insights, workflows, and learnings while keeping them centralized, so that your staff can always be informed and educated about how to keep reducing costs. 

Reducing costs is a continuous effort

Once you start focusing on reducing production costs and waste, you’ll find that there are infinite ways to keep making improvements. Start where it makes sense for you and your team now. Every effort is worthwhile, and each improvement will lead you to more ideas. 

If you’re ready to learn more about how MaintainX can help your team drive down production costs and waste, book a demo today.