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  • 1.  Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 23 days ago

    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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  • 2.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 22 days ago

    Interested to hear the replies here.  We have recently kicked off a new budgeting request. Since Maximo is our CMMS and we strive to get a true cost of ownership we have requested that our maintenance leaders begin creating budgets by Asset Class.  For example, a robot manipulator.  What is the planned PM cost, estimated breakdown costs and any planned project costs for these types of assets?  And repeat the process for the remaining top asset classes.  Not only does this allow us to see if cost of a specific type of equipment is higher than expected. It also allows us to identify when one site is experiencing higher costs with a specific type of equipment than others.  But your Maximo data needs to be accurate and costs applied to the correct assets.  We're still working towards getting that correct.  Good luck.



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    Scott Hamilton
    Reliability Unit Leader
    Honda Development & Manufacturing of America, LLC
    Marysville OH
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  • 3.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 22 days ago

    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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  • 4.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 6 days ago

    Thank you for taking the time to share this, this is incredibly helpful and very well structured. I really like how you've tied labor, parts, and services together, especially with the validation against the 5-year historical spend. That level of discipline around forecasting and weekly tracking is impressive.

    One question I had as I was reading through this-when you're building out the budget, do you factor in historical failure data or condition-based indicators (such as trends from predictive maintenance tools) to refine the reactive or overhaul portions of the budget?

    I'm curious how much of that "repeatable year-over-year" spend could potentially be shifted or reduced if failure patterns or early indicators were more proactively incorporated into the planning process.

    Would love your perspective on that.



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    Linda Perry
    Senior Business Development Executive
    The Viswa Group
    American canyon CA
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  • 5.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 6 days ago

    For reactive work,  we stick with the trend from the prior 5 years but we will adjust if we know we performed and completed a specific action that would mitigate failure then we would remove those reactive costs but also evaluate if it will transfer future costs to preventive/predictive and add back a portion if necessary.   Same with Overhauls,  if we do an equipment re-design or replace an asset on the line,  then we would project future PM costs as the plans are built before equipment is started.   We make the best attempt at getting the costs but only historical data will prove out the initial assumption.   When we do projects,  there is a cross functional team where part of the deliverables is a fully set up equipment in CMMS,  Properly labeled on the field and all CM signals tied in and validated to our historical trend process.   We require spares to be on site prior to starting the equipment running tests in case we have a failure.  These will all be linked to the assets in our CMMS.  All Manuals and drawings need to be on site but often drawings are not filed until redlines are completed following installation.

     

    As far as repeatability,  It tends to be pretty constant year over year especially at the overall rolled up level for the entire site.  You will see variability asset by asset but it tends to wash out as you roll up to the production line and to the site.   One watch out are aging and obsolete assets that have are not planned to be replaced.   With these we will add a request for a 1 year adder to do some upgrades to guard against obsolescence until the equipment can be replace.  Some of this will be only one year but some may continue as the cost to maintain at end of life tends to increase but it would be picked up on our modeling curve.  We don't just do a straight linear average line but rather a fit curve to the data so it will more accurately project end of life type instances.

     

    Hopefully that helps to answer your questions.   As a side note,  not sure if I mentioned this earlier but we are automatically pulling this data and putting into a powerbi dashboard so the maintenance team can watch their spend week over week and not get caught by surprise.

     

    If you have any other questions,  feel free to reach out.

    Mark

     

     






  • 6.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 21 days ago

    Great practical breakdown from both Scott and Mark. One thing I'd add from a maintenance reliability perspective: the budgeting framework only works as well as your asset criticality ranking supports it. When you know which assets carry the highest operational risk, you can allocate budget with much more confidence across your PM, breakdown and capital renewal lines.

    For professionals preparing for the CMRP, this is exactly the kind of thinking the Business & Management domain tests: connecting maintenance investment decisions to organizational risk and business outcomes, not just historical spend.



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    CHRISTIAN DIMENE
    Founder & Principal Consultant
    The Certify Hub
    Breslau ON
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  • 7.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 20 days ago
    Hello Team,

    If you are planning to take the CMRP, you can use this book for almost all the pillars to be covered. It should be a one stop shop. I am planning to take the exam in a few days and I am referring to this one book alone.

    Smith, R., & Mobley, R. K. (2008). Rules of thumb for maintenance and reliability engineers (1st ed.). Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann.

    Hope this helps.

    Thanks,
    Kiran





  • 8.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 19 days ago

    Hi Lesiba,

    A good way to structure the 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year maintenance budget is to use a framework built around asset criticality, equipment condition, statutory/compliance requirements, production risk, and lifecycle needs.

    1-Year Budget
    This is usually the execution-focused budget. It should cover:

    • Training and maintenance work system (identifying training gaps and work systems such as planning & scheduling). This is critical as it help gain control of the budget. 
    • Routine preventive and predictive maintenance/condition monitoring 
    • Known corrective work,
    • Mandatory inspections and compliance work,
    • Outage/shutdown requirements,
    • Critical spare parts,
    • and a reasonable contingency for emergent/discovery work.

    At this stage, the budget is usually driven by current asset condition, backlog review, failure history, and confirmed operational priorities for the year. Ensure to review fixed cost such as labour/salaries and other yearly maintenance contract cost. If you are not able to procure all the critical spares due to funds constrain, ensure you have the critical spare on the risk register and budget for them the following year. Having the right critical spare is critical to managing your budget and also keeping you in business.  

    3-Year Budget
    This is more of a tactical reliability plan. It should include:

    • Recurring major maintenance,
    • Planned overhauls,
    • Asset health improvement work,
    • Reliability projects to eliminate chronic losses, and
    • Replacement planning for assets showing degradation or rising maintenance cost.

    This horizon helps connect annual budgeting to a medium-term maintenance strategy rather than reacting year by year. Ensure you have the classification right on your CMMS for easy identification of these task/reporting.

    5-Year Budget
    This should be the strategic asset management view. It normally focuses on:

    • Lifecycle replacement requirements (try to pay close attention to your controls systems, some manufacturer do provide complimentary lifecycle management services and this can be helpful), 
    • Major rebuilds,
    • Long-term statutory events,
    • Obsolescence risks,
    • Infrastructure upgrades.

    At this level, the purpose is to ensure maintenance spending aligns with business goals, risk tolerance, and long-term asset sustainability. Again do not forget to update your risk register periodically. 

    Good Luck 



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    Earnest Iluore
    Engineering, Maintenance and Reliability Manager
    Domtar Paper Company
    Kingsport TN
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  • 9.  RE: Maintenance Budgeting

    Posted 17 days ago

    Hy Lesiba!

    In general terms, defining a maintenance budget for 1-, 3-, and 5-year horizons is based on three main pillars: operational history, asset criticality, and maintenance strategy.

    To ensure a consistent approach, we typically structure it as follows:

    1. Asset mapping and classification
    Initially, we perform a comprehensive asset mapping, classifying them according to criticality (impact on production, safety, and environment) and predominant maintenance type (preventive, predictive, or corrective).

    2. Historical and performance analysis
    We analyze historical data such as failure records, maintenance costs, MTBF/MTTR, and past interventions to understand asset behavior and identify failure patterns or recurring issues.

    3. Maintenance strategy definition
    Based on criticality and historical performance, we define the most appropriate strategy for each asset:

    • Preventive maintenance (time- or usage-based)
    • Predictive maintenance (condition-based)
    • Planned corrective maintenance
    • Retrofit or replacement actions when applicable

    4. Budget projection by time horizon

    • Short term (1 year):
      A more detailed and operational budget, including defined maintenance plans, scheduled shutdowns, existing contracts, labor, materials, and contingencies.
    • Mid term (3 years):
      A projection based on major maintenance cycles, overhauls, replacement of critical components, and adjustments considering asset aging and historical trends.
    • Long term (5 years):
      A strategic view, including CAPEX considerations (asset replacement), modernization initiatives, efficiency improvements, and total cost of ownership (TCO) optimization.

    5. Cost structure
    The budget is typically segmented into:

    • Labor (in-house and outsourced)
    • Materials and spare parts
    • Specialized services
    • Equipment and tools
    • Indirect costs (management, safety, mobilization)
    • Technical contingencies

    6. Periodic review and governance
    Plans are reviewed periodically (typically annually or semi-annually), allowing adjustments based on actual performance, operational changes, or new demands.



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    Adilan Bittar
    Financial Director
    RAL Manutenção e Montagens LTDA
    ARACRUZ
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