The Three Elements Every Leader Should Expect

Every manufacturing and industrial leader agrees that maintenance and reliability (M&R) performance is central to throughput, cost, asset life, and risk.  Yet when leaders ask for the site’s “maintenance and reliability strategy,” they often receive a list of projects, technologies, or best practice checkboxes.

What most leaders really want, and need, is clarity.
Clarity on how maintenance supports the business strategy.
Clarity on where to focus limited resources.
Clarity on which improvements will actually move the P&L.

Everyone Uses the Word “Strategy,” But Few Mean the Same Thing

Organizations frequently confuse activity with strategy.

• Some think strategy means implementing best practices.
• Others think it means choosing a software system.
• Some assume it’s a Gantt chart of reliability initiatives.

The result of this confusion is misalignment.  M&R teams run hard in directions that don’t match business priorities. Leaders grow frustrated. Improvements stall, and good people burn out.

Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy Bad Strategy, defines strategy as:

“A coherent set of analyses, concepts, policies, arguments, and actions that respond to a high-stakes challenge.”

M&R strategy is no different and can’t be built in a vacuum.  It must be rooted in the company’s business strategy, operating model, constraints, and culture.

What Is Maintenance & Reliability Strategy?

A real M&R strategy has three core elements:

1. What to Do
2. How to Do It
3. How Much It’s Worth

These three components ensure alignment, feasibility, and economic value — the ingredients of every successful reliability improvement effort.

1. What to Do: Choosing the Right Priorities

An M&R strategy starts with understanding the business you’re supporting:

• What field is the company playing on?
• How is the company trying to win?
• What constraints shape how operations run day-to-day?

Without this context, even good ideas fail.

A common misstep is applying “best practices” without considering operational realities.  For example, a new reliability leader may try to implement freezing a maintenance schedule at four weeks out because it worked at their previous plant.  If the new site has a volatile production schedule that changes weekly, that approach will create chaos, strain relationships, and fail to deliver results.

In this situation the right “what to do” is simpler and more aligned:

• Prioritize job readiness over long-horizon scheduling.
• Strengthen BOMs and kitting to improve flexibility and wrench time.
• Build foundational job plans before worrying about sophisticated scheduling systems.

Strategy is as much about choosing what not to do as what to do.

2. How to Do It: The Order, Resources, and Costs

Once the right priorities are identified, the next strategic question becomes:
How will we implement these changes successfully?

Every plant has bottlenecks — not just equipment bottlenecks, but people bottlenecks.
The roles that typically constrain implementation include:

• Planners and schedulers
• Reliability engineers
• Maintenance supervisors
• Frontline technicians

You can only ask these groups to absorb one or two changes at a time.  Too much change at once creates failure, frustration, and initiative fatigue.

A sound M&R strategy must define:

• The sequence of changes: Which improvements must come first?
• Implementation cost: What labor, materials, training, and external support are required?
• Sustaining cost: What will it take to maintain the new way of working? 

Sustaining costs are often overlooked.

For example:
Building a new PM might take a reliability engineer one hour.
Executing that PM every week for years may cost 52 technician-hours annually — a far larger investment.

3. How Much It’s Worth: Connecting M&R to the P&L

Finally — and critically — an M&R strategy must answer the executive question:

What is this worth to the business?

It’s a common mistake to limit the focus of value on what the initiative is worth to the maintenance department or how much better the culture will “feel”.

A real M&R strategy will have a clear link back to the bottom line of the company.  

• How does this improve throughput?
• How does it reduce operating cost?
• How does it influence capital and asset life?
• How will risk be reduced?

Every strategic initiative must be linked to the financial levers the company uses to win in its chosen playing field.  A clear business case will include a validated impact on the size of the opportunity, the costs associated with the change, and the net benefit.

Leaders are right to expect this clarity — and M&R teams become far more influential when they can deliver it.

Strategy Isn’t a Checklist — It’s a Connection

Best practices are valuable, but they’re not strategy.

A real maintenance and reliability strategy:

• Aligns to how the business competes
• Focuses resources on the right priorities
• Respects organizational constraints
• Converts technical improvements into financial outcomes

When leaders ask their teams for an M&R strategy, this is what they should expect.  When teams deliver this level of clarity, alignment improves, decisions get easier, and reliability becomes a competitive advantage — not an afterthought.