Usually the maintenance team will be waiting for the meeting or workshop where the top management starts to challenge the requester, trying to reduce the maintenance budget as low as possible in order to have a competitive advantage among the other competitors, and usually the poor maintenance fox or whoever is in charge to negotiate with the top management will simply agree on those tough cost cuts, unless he has a very strong reason to defend and to convince them for such budget figure.

This means that the budget items or details have to be built on a solid foundation, including facts, anticipations, objectives and analysis.

In order to have such strong evidence(s) to convince the top management, you must have accurate information about the status of your equipment’s and what does it need exactly, and in order to reach such level of accuracy, you must do failure analysis for all repetitive and chronic failures.

Failure analysis is the right way to identify the real causes led to the failure, and identifying the root causes or real causes behind the failure is the starting point to save your money , prepare the accurate budget and get the right keys to open the top management mind to accept your requirements.

Failure analysis or root cause analysis, is simply asking (why), and then you keep asking this (why) question until you reach the root cause(s).

So for example:

Why the pump failed ……… Cause of the broken shaft.

Why the shaft was broken ……… Cause (maybe material is not suitable for the application, or maybe because it was exposed to extra load, or maybe it was bended, and so on)

And then based on the facts you have or by using the NDT (Non Destructive Tests) you might avoid some of the causes or keep some for more investigations.

Then your ask again why? And so on until you reach the real causes behind the failure and then you should identify the actions to fix and improve or eliminate these root causes, which might need a budget !