“Maintenance is all firefighting. PMs slip, and the spare is never on the shelf.”
Planned vs. reactive is upside down, the backlog keeps growing, and the crib has everything except the part you need.
What you’re facing
Your maintenance team is good — and exhausted. Most of the week goes to breakdowns. PMs get pushed “until next week” and next week never comes. The work-order backlog grows every month.
When a critical machine goes down, the needed spare isn’t on the shelf. Meanwhile the crib is full of parts for equipment you retired years ago. Nobody can say which assets matter most, so everything is urgent.
What this is costing you
- •Unplanned downtime on the assets that pace the plant
- •Overtime and emergency contractor call-outs
- •Expedited parts at premium prices — and obsolete inventory nobody writes off
- •Shorter equipment life from running to failure
- •Quality defects from equipment drifting out of condition
The questions you’re probably asking
Isn’t TPM just operators wiping down machines?
Autonomous maintenance is one pillar. A working maintenance system also needs criticality ranking, PM optimization, planning and scheduling, a spares strategy, and root cause on repeat failures.
We don’t have time for PMs. How do we get out of the hole?
By focusing first on the few critical assets that cause most of the pain, protecting a small amount of planned time for them, and letting that freed-up capacity fund the next group.
Do we need a new CMMS?
Usually not first. Most plants have a system that is under-used. Clean asset data, criticality and disciplined work-order practice matter more than the software.
What to do first
- 1Rank your equipment by criticality — impact on safety, quality, delivery and cost.
- 2Measure the real planned-vs-reactive ratio and PM compliance for the top 10 critical assets.
- 3Audit the spares for those same 10 assets: what is on the shelf, what should be, what is obsolete.
- 4Pick the single worst repeat failure and run a root cause on it.
What best practice says
Reliability practice consistently shows that mature operations do the large majority of their maintenance as planned work, with reactive work a small minority. The path there starts with criticality: you cannot plan everything at once, so you protect the assets that matter most.
Spares follow criticality too. Critical-asset spares get min/max levels based on lead time and failure history; non-critical and obsolete stock gets rationalized. TPM then adds operator care, abnormality tagging and focused improvement on chronic losses.
Method, sized to scope
TPM built on criticality: asset ranking, PM optimization, planned-vs-actual tracking, spares min/max by criticality, and root cause on repeat failures.
The Exceleor Path, applied to your situation
Every engagement across the Exceleor family follows the same eight stages: Understand, Execute, Sustain. About the Exceleor Path
1. Discovery
In your situation: We baseline planned vs. reactive, PM compliance, backlog, MTBF and MTTR on your critical assets.
2. Define the engagement path
In your situation: We build the criticality ranking and agree which assets and failure modes to attack first.
3. Training
In your situation: Maintenance planners, technicians and operators learn TPM fundamentals and work-order discipline.
4. Implement & engage
In your situation: We optimize PMs, set spares min/max by criticality, launch operator care and run root cause on repeat failures.
5. Verify
In your situation: We verify planned-vs-actual, PM compliance and downtime against baseline.
6. Validate
In your situation: We validate the gain through a full PM cycle on the pilot assets.
7. Transfer ownership
In your situation: Your planners own the weekly schedule, the backlog review and the spares rules.
8. Sustain & grow
In your situation: We roll the model out to the next tier of assets.
What you’ll have at the end
- An equipment criticality ranking everyone agrees on
- Rising planned-vs-reactive ratio and PM compliance
- Critical spares on the shelf — and obsolete stock identified
- Fewer repeat failures on critical assets
- A weekly maintenance planning rhythm your team runs
Why QMSLean
We start from the business symptom, not a favorite tool. The method — A3, Kaizen or DMAIC — is chosen to fit the size of the problem.
We work on the floor and in the office with your people, and we build the sustain system before we leave, so the gain is still there after we are gone.
And when the root of the problem sits outside Lean, the Exceleor family of companies covers quality systems, supplier quality, EHS and leadership.
Tell us what’s going on.
Request a Situation Review. A Lean practitioner will reply by email with how we would approach your version of this problem.