ABSTRACT
Maintenance is a big business. The amount of money that industrial companies spend each year on maintaining their plants (chemical plants, energy plants, discrete manufacturing plants, etc.) ranges from 2% to more than 5% of the plant replacement value. About a third of that maintenance cost is labor. And labor cost is strongly driven by the way in which work is planned and carried out. If one looks at the maintenance work that gets done every day in factories around the world, one would notice that the execution is very often inefficient, from a Lean perspective: time is wasted, different tasks are not properly coordinated, job durations are overestimated, and job plans, when they exist, are thus “inflated” to cover up the inefficiency.
