Dear all,

Thank you all for your input. As stated in many of your answers, I agree, it is highly contextualized depending on which type of industry we are talking about. Personally, I view maintenance-related waste from a couple of perspectives; (1) where the waste is created and (2) where the consequences of the waste are manifested. This is also why I favor the term ‘maintenance-related waste’ and not ‘maintenance waste’, as the waste can be created elsewhere but the consequences (and with that, often, increased cost) can end up in a maintenance department/function.

(1) Maintenance-related waste can be created from poorly performed maintenance (low efficiency in maintenance function), poor requirement specification from value stream (risk for too high or too low demands), value stream not taking care of assets in a proper way (running machines out of specs., not performing basic autonomous maintenance), etc.

(2) Maintenance-related waste can either manifest its consequences on direct (maintenance efficiency) or indirect maintenance cost (maintenance effectiveness).

In my experiences, from both industry and academia, I consider poor customer specification (and/or communication between maintenance function and value stream) as one of the biggest maintenance-related wastes. If a maintenance function do not know how much services and/or to which levels to deliver is enough there is a risk in over- or under-maintaining assets, rendering increased direct cost from excessive work or indirect cost for unavailability, quality-, safety-, and environmental issues. Other maintenance-related waste I have experience from, some also mentioned in previous answers, includes: poor planning, misuse of work order system, limited or poor usage of preventive maintenance (autonomous maintenance included), poor spare part management, poor quality spare parts, poor quality work, etc. etc. When authoring this reply to your answers, I come to think about yet another big one: not being aware of or talking about the existence of maintenance-related waste… BR/Marcus

I have not made any academic research related to maintenance, so my answer is based in my professional industrial experience in a canned food manufacturing plant.As an open question I will answer it from two different points of view.

If we are talking about tangible waste, I discard money, of course. Maintenance is about saving money. According to my experience, the biggest tangible, material waste, in weight, are metals. Tons of metals that cannot be reused at the plant. The good point is that you can recuperate part of its cost by selling it as scrap. The second maintenance related waste are the plastics from the envelopments of spare parts.

If we are talking about intangible waste, I have no doubt that it is the time you have to expend, to waste, to make manufacturing managers realize that investing time and money in maintenance is the best way to make the plant efficient.

In my opinion, the amount of money spent on manufacturer recommended spares, but lying unused for long periods of time. The problem is worse, when there are no guarantees for a requisite number of years or strong and immediate service support (especially internationally).

For a manufacturing industry, the major maintenance wastes/losses are; losses of time due to waiting for the decision making, technicians, tools and spares. Additionally, looses of time and resources for collecting inspection/condition monitoring data which are not based on identified KPIs/PIs and not used .....

Manufacturing Industry can be of different types and the waste associated with the maintenance could also be different. As for example, an industry can be in the business of producing (a) machinery (b) chemicals (c) glass and glass-wares (d) food & beverages (e) textiles etc.

Let us consider the case of a chemical industry, where raw chemicals undergo a processing and at the end final product is obtained. In such an industry there can be

(a) Routine maintenance work which are normally planned and

happen periodically

(b) Unforeseen maintenance work

In case of (a) the waste generation is normally minimum due to planning. In case of (b) the waste produced could be pretty high in level. This is mostly because of the fact that the raw-materials that are already in-process for conversion, may not be in a stage where from they can be recovered or recycled.

In general, maintenance work in a production unit may give rise to waste in the form of (a) idle manpower (b) wastage of in-process raw-materials (c) raw-materials' inventory build-up (d) wastage generated out of various utilities (e) wastage due to disturbed product schedule and associated delay in supply to the customer etc.

Dear all,

Thank you all for your input. As stated in many of your answers, I agree, it is highly contextualized depending on which type of industry we are talking about. Personally, I view maintenance-related waste from a couple of perspectives; (1) where the waste is created and (2) where the consequences of the waste are manifested. This is also why I favor the term ‘maintenance-related waste’ and not ‘maintenance waste’, as the waste can be created elsewhere but the consequences (and with that, often, increased cost) can end up in a maintenance department/function.

(1) Maintenance-related waste can be created from poorly performed maintenance (low efficiency in maintenance function), poor requirement specification from value stream (risk for too high or too low demands), value stream not taking care of assets in a proper way (running machines out of specs., not performing basic autonomous maintenance), etc.

(2) Maintenance-related waste can either manifest its consequences on direct (maintenance efficiency) or indirect maintenance cost (maintenance effectiveness).

In my experiences, from both industry and academia, I consider poor customer specification (and/or communication between maintenance function and value stream) as one of the biggest maintenance-related wastes. If a maintenance function do not know how much services and/or to which levels to deliver is enough there is a risk in over- or under-maintaining assets, rendering increased direct cost from excessive work or indirect cost for unavailability, quality-, safety-, and environmental issues. Other maintenance-related waste I have experience from, some also mentioned in previous answers, includes: poor planning, misuse of work order system, limited or poor usage of preventive maintenance (autonomous maintenance included), poor spare part management, poor quality spare parts, poor quality work, etc. etc. When authoring this reply to your answers, I come to think about yet another big one: not being aware of or talking about the existence of maintenance-related waste… BR/Marcus

Dear Marcus Bengtsson,

Control of maintenance-related waste is dependent on product type, engineering system and maintenance management. But according to my experience in biological and pharmaceutical industries, the following factors are the biggest challenges in maintenance waste control (and accordingly they can be the best opportunities for reducing waste and improvement of maintenance system.

1. Bad facility design

2. Misconfigurations between facilities and maintenance systems

3. Incorrect cooperation between operators of production lines and maintenance staffs

4. Inappropriate level of education, skills and training of both production lines and maintenance personnel

5. Use of old technologies (new and smart technologies and tools needs less maintenance and accordingly resulted better maintainability)

6. Doing over maintenance (wrong preventive maintenance or doing corrective maintenance more than it is needed).