Preventive maintenance has been the accepted religion of industrial reliability for thirty years. A new benchmark from Limble, published October 8, suggests that a lot of plants are not actually practicing it.
The Numbers
Across the surveyed maintenance leaders, only 54 percent of scheduled PMs were completed. Forty-seven percent reported more than ten hours of unplanned downtime per month. Forty percent estimated their downtime cost at more than 100,000 dollars per year. And 82 percent said they own a CMMS — while only 39 percent said the whole team actually uses it.
That last pair of numbers is the story. The software is not missing. The work is not getting done.
The Gap Is Not Discipline Alone
A companion survey of 2,234 maintenance leaders by MaintainX found that 79 percent still cannot reduce downtime. If the problem were purely planning, a CMMS adoption curve would have fixed it by now. It has not, because a PM that cannot be executed for lack of a part is not a scheduling problem. It is a parts problem wearing a scheduling costume.
What the Data Says Closes the Gap
The same Limble benchmark offers the clearest before-and-after in the dataset:
- Teams capturing 82 percent of their work run 36 percent unplanned work.
- Teams capturing 45 percent of their work run 56 percent unplanned work.
A twenty-point gap in work capture corresponds to a twenty-point swing in reactive work. Part of that capture is tooling and training. A large part of it is simply having the right part at the moment the task is scheduled — because a tech who walks to the crib and comes back empty-handed has just converted a planned task into a deferral.
The Three-Part Diagnosis
- Long-lead spares that everyone assumes are on the shelf but are not, because nobody owns the list.
- High-wear consumables that run out quietly and take a PM down with them.
- Obsolete and discontinued parts with no defined replacement path, which stall a PM for weeks while someone sources a substitute.
None of those three is solved by better scheduling. All three are solved by treating the crib as the front line of the PM program.
What to Do This Month
Pull your PM schedule and your parts usage side by side. For each scheduled task, ask one question: if this came due tomorrow, would the part be on the shelf? Every no is a PM that will not get done, and it is cheaper to discover that in a spreadsheet than on the floor.
That exercise usually produces a short list: bearings, seals, mounted units, drives, and the fast-moving power-transmission components behind most rotating-equipment PMs.
Where RBC Fits
RBC Industrial builds critical-spares lists and vendor-managed inventory programs around exactly that list — tapered roller and mounted bearing assemblies, power transmission components, and the fluid power and automation parts that a PM schedule depends on. The goal is not a bigger crib. It is a crib where the part behind tomorrow's PM is already there.
RBC Industrial · (915) 845-8188 · www.rbc-industrial.com