Strategy Without Execution is Just Hallucination - Thomas Edison

This is a quote that a lot of people might be a bit fed up hearing from me but I think I’m going to be saying it for a while yet because it’s such a true statement.

(A slight wrinkle with it is it’s not entirely clear if Edison ever said it but it remains a true statement)

Very few organisations have confidence in their existing maintenance strategies. Equipment reliability is less that desired, maintenance budgets are higher than can be accepted, hence, there is often a desire for the strategies to be reviewed to find better solutions.

They would like the new strategies to:

• Cost less than existing maintenance strategy

• Need executed less frequently

• Require less parts

• Need fewer, less well trained people to execute,

• Result in a step change increase in equipment reliability

There’s no question that maintenance strategy reviews can help deliver a lot of these benefits if the existing strategies are not delivering the desired outcome, (although very rarely can all of these benefits be delivered at once). However, before embarking on a maintenance strategy review with an objective to increase reliability resulting from a belief that the existing strategies aren’t working, it’s worth asking “Are we actually executing the maintenance we have in the system at the moment?”

If an organisation has significant backlogs, or a significant volume of Preventative Maintenance is being signed off incomplete, or its deferring a significant volume of it then changing the strategy may simply result in there being a different set of documents that aren’t being executed with no change in delivery performance.