Why This $1.4 Trillion Maintenance Problem Keeps Getting Worse (And Why Your Plant Is Probably No Exception)
We need to have an honest conversation about our industry.
Unplanned downtime cost the world’s largest manufacturers $864 billion in 2021. By 2024 that number had climbed to $1.4 trillion—a 62% increase in just three years. The average plant is now losing 360 hours of production per year to breakdowns.
And here’s the part that should keep every Maintenance & Reliability professional up at night: 82% of companies experienced at least one unplanned downtime event in the last three years. And despite decades of frameworks, tools, and best practices, 67% of manufacturers are still operating in a largely reactive maintenance mode.
We’ve had ISO 55000. We’ve had RCM, TPM, CBM, APM, and now AI-powered predictive tools. We’ve had certifications, conferences, white papers, and more consulting frameworks than anyone can count. The advice has been largely the same for 30 years.
So why is the problem getting worse, not better?
Maybe it’s because the gap in this industry has never been knowledge. It’s been execution.
Plants know they should have a robust PM program. They build one, then watch it erode within 18 months when production pressure hits. They invest in a CMMS and find it’s a $500k data graveyard three years later.
They send people to training but nothing changes on the floor once they return. We keep prescribing the right medicine and wondering why the patient isn’t recovering. The answer is that knowing what to do and actually embedding it into daily operations are two completely different problems. Most of the industry is very good at the first one but lack the capability for the latter.
This is where we as M&R practitioners are failing our organizations. Real, sustainable reliability improvement isn’t a project that gets handed off. It’s a culture that gets built. Side by side, on the floor, through the hard but mostly unrecognizable moments when production wants to skip the PM and run the machine anyway.
For the past 25+ years, across 3 continents and 15 countries, Osorno Group has been doing exactly that. We don’t deliver frameworks then leave or write reports that collect dust. We get into the trenches with our clients and help them build a sustainable strategy, develop their people, drive execution, and we stay until the results are real and self-sustaining.
If your plant is stuck in the same downtime cycle that it was in five years ago, the problem isn’t that you don’t know what good looks like. The problem is that no one is helping you get there.
From wood products, to solar cells and medical devices, Osorno knows manufacturing. And we know what it takes to cut your unplanned downtime costs and take your operations to the next level. If your plant is stuck fighting the same costly downtime battles, click here to start a conversation with our team.
Sources
- Senseye. (2021). The true cost of downtime 2021. Siemens/Senseye. https://senseye.io/resources/reports/the-true-cost-of-downtime-2021/
- Senseye. (2024). The true cost of downtime 2024. Siemens/Senseye. https://senseye.io/resources/reports/the-true-cost-of-downtime-2024/
- ABB. (2023). Value of reliability survey [Survey report; N = 3,215 maintenance and operations decision-makers globally].
- ServiceMax & UpKeep. (2023). State of maintenance report. UpKeep. https://upkeep.com/learning/maintenance-benchmarks/
