How much is ignorance costing your organization?

Ignorance is  more serious problem than what's identified during the Tonight Show street interviews of pedestrians for answers to commonly known questions.

Studies have proven that approximately 70% of equipment failures are self induced. Maintenance operations currently perform at  levels between 10-40% efficiency.  Organizations typically operate in the  very expensive reactive mode and not the optimal proactive mode.   Businesses strive to achieve their performance goals but yet continually fall short not due to customer demand or competitor strength but simply due to obstacles of their own creation.

Ignorance is a very expensive, unstated problem plaguing business. Numerous companies literally are closing their factories and receiving numerous lawsuit penalties due to product  defects. In addition many companies are losing market share not because of the lack of sales or product quality but because of the lack of manufacturing capacity. These results are often not because of employee laziness, apathy or criminal intent. Many times they literally just do not know any better method to conduct themselves. 

Ignorance is not just on the production floor.

Business executives have the ultimate influence in organizations performance and direction. Maintenance is critical component for a company to deliver capacity and quality. However, how many actually truly understand the value of maintenance? How many have actually attended a proactive maintenance seminar?

Daily CFO's  reject personnel training programs and other  capacity enhancements initiatives due to short term costs.  They  typically do  not fully comprehend long term value provided.  Although they have good intentions of saving the company money, unknowingly many are literally restricting their companies growth and ability to fully achieve their business objectives.


"The society that  scorns excellence in plumbing, because it is a "humble" activity, and  tolerates shoddiness in philosophy, because philosophy is an "exalted" activity, will not have good plumbing nor good philosophy- neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water." John Gardner

How long can we  afford to ignore our business' ignorance?

Joel Leonard is a Maintenance Consultant for MPACT Learning Center, LLC.. Please check back often to their site or this one for more related in-depth articles to come.