I've worked in the maintenance and reliability at 3 different fortune 500 companies and the process tends to vary a little at each company. I would say the basic methodology looks at three areas to build the budget from the ground up. 1. Labor - this is predicated on the amount of work needed to support the production line based on line time available. Shorter maintenance window with limited condition based maintenance will require larger work force. A more reactive maintenance program will require a larger work force to support than a highly condition based maintenance program. Whether you use autonomous maintenance in your site will also determine the amount of headcount you will carry on your budget assuming autonomous maintenance is not charged over to the maintenance budget. We include in this labor budget a cost for training and development per individual to ensure we have money to adequately train our work force. We just use a fixed number per person in the budget times the number of people. If there is specialized gaps due to labor shortages then you may want a line item to cover that with specialized training. For instance, there were several years where we couldn't hire trained maintenance labor so we ran an apprenticeship program with a local community college for a few years to build up our staffing. This helped to close the gap but was not a normal cost item year over year. 2. Replacement parts - these come from two areas of the maintenance process, PM / Machine overhauls which tend to be predictable as to the cost and breakdown which tend to be unpredictable. If you take all of your known PM's and parts needed to execute those PM's plus your known equipment overhauls at 1, 3, 5 and 10 year marks and have all of them built into your CMMS system then you can run reports to project the work which will also include the projected labor to complete. Reactive or breakdown work while not easily predictable, on a stable production system when rolling up for a plant tends to be very repeatable year over year if you take into account inflation. We take this as a percentage of parts spend to get the total. 3. Maintenance services - what contract labor will you utilize in your site to support your processes with specialized skills. In a manufacturing site that has historical data then you know what tasks are contracted out and this again tends to be more related to overhaul type work or specialized repairs. For example we have a certified tank inspector in to inspect a certain population of our tanks each year. We budget for that expense and spread the population over several years cycle for all tanks in our facility. We then roll up the sum of these 3 areas an estimated budget, add in adjustments for inflation. As a check on this we will pull a 5 year historical spend by production line and use a fit curve to understand if the projected budget for the future year will follow that curve and if not can we specify why IE we have a 10 year overhaul that will shift the cost and if we remove that it will fit the curve. We then monitor by week, maintenance spend by production line. There is typically an Engineer who is responsible for that line and therefore the budget. By watching it each week, we can stay on top of our spend. As a side note we track as a sub set of our maintenance spend and the budget needed for our overhauls because often this planning and purchasing period may be 8 months and we want to make sure we don't drop the spend in at the end of 8 months and get a surprise so it is budgeted by month for when we expect those costs to hit then monitor the overhaul budget and spend by month. While not a perfect process it is allowing our site to come in less than 1% variance to our budget each year.
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Mark Pospisil
Program Manager Maintenance Excellence AN Division
Abbott Laboratories
Sunbury OH
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Original Message:
Sent: 03-24-2026 06:10 AM
From: Lesiba Moja
Subject: Maintenance Budgeting
Greeting Maintenance & Reliability Proffesionals
I wanted to find out what type of framework do you guys follow when setting your 1 year, 3 year & 5 year maintenance budget?
Would be grea to find out how you guys do it?
Cheers
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Lesiba Moja
Senior Reliability Engineer
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