ABSTRACT
I was fortunate to have had great stewards of the facility before me who had set the example. For the times, the plant already had a serviceable preventive maintenance system. It was a paper card system, but it worked. There was also a robust rolling 3-year facility maintenance program in place that one of my wise predecessors had put into place and which had religiously been continued over the years. Its purpose was to keep all real-estate assets and plant services assets in the proper state of repair/ replacement at all times. It also allowed the plant team to put upcoming major capital expenditure needs on the table with more senior leaders so there were no surprises later when the funds were requested. The really big numbers (i.e., more than $1 million) were typically identified a year or more before the actual need to aid in the financial planning process. These are things I came to take for granted until I got into acquired plants a few years later and found out how progressive the maintenance systems had been in the Richmond, Indiana, plant of Belden Wire & Cable Company since the early 1970s. In fact, the 3-year rolling facility maintenance plan became a model that I applied in all plants for the rest of my career.
