You know the best practices. Here’s three reasons you’re not seeing results.

In heavy industry and manufacturing, most leaders have no shortage of smart, experienced maintenance experts — and plenty of best practices at their fingertips.

So why are downtime, cost overruns, and firefighting still the norm?

The hard truth: Knowing best practices isn’t the same as improving performance. This article explores why execution often fails — and what to do differently.

Reason 1: Best Practices Often Lack Business Impact

Many best practices sound great in theory. But in practice, they often fail to influence the business drivers leaders actually care about. Why?

Because the connection between a best practice and a bottom-line result is not always clear.

For example, take Preventive Maintenance Optimization (PMO). A team might spend weeks updating PM tasks, adding inspections, standardizing procedures, and reviewing OEM recommendations. All good things but six months later, breakdowns haven’t dropped, costs haven’t improved, and the plant’s reliability metrics are flat.

How could this happen? Because the original drivers of downtime weren’t PM-related. They were related to poor scheduling and poor overall asset condition.  Even an excellent PM program can not overcome foundational issues with inherent reliability.  

In short: implementing best practices that aren’t tied to root causes don’t move the needle.

What to Do Instead:

To ensure best practices actually improve performance:

1. Define the problem clearly. Don’t jump into solution mode. Start with facts and data to understand the issue.
2. Analyze the drivers. What’s really causing cost, downtime, or lost throughput?
3. Think critically and creatively. Use the knowledge of best practices, but challenge assumptions.  Is this really the right lever to pull?  Make sure every action is tied to a measurable business outcome.

Reason 2: Best Practices Are Chain-Linked

Best practices are not standalone tools.  They’re part of a system of interrelated practices and referred to as “chain-linked”.  Think of best practices like links in a chain.  Strengthening one link while ignoring the others doesn’t make the chain more effective – it just puts more stress on the weak links.

Many initiatives focus too narrowly.  We pick one or two areas to improve, because they’re familiar, comfortable, or in our area of expertise and we go deep.  Meanwhile, other essential pieces of the puzzle are neglected.

Consider the example of plants investing in world-class lubrication programs while ignoring poor equipment installation practices, which continues to cause failures regardless of lubrication quality.

Without a cohesive strategy, these siloed efforts hit diminishing returns.

What to Do Instead:

To overcome this trap:

1. Map out how best practices interact. Don’t look at them in isolation – look at how they support each other.
2. Analyze the entire workflow. Where does the process break down across handoffs?  Where are there friction points or redundancies?  Consider how each best practice is connected and interrelated across the organization. 
3. Monitor progress and remove hurdles. If something’s stalling your improvement, treat that like a problem to solve.  Talk to the frontline of the organization and act quickly to remove barriers to implementation.  Uncover the weak links and act quickly to shore them up. 

Reason 3: People Make It Work (or Not)

Finally, and most critically, none of these best practices work without people.

You can have the best asset strategies, most efficient maintenance plans, and world-class analytics.  But if supervisors aren’t on board, if operators don’t trust the process, or if planners are overloaded, the implementation stalls or fails outright.

Too often, we forget that performance improvement is a change initiative, not just a technical exercise.  It takes real engagement to move people from awareness to ownership.

What to Do Instead:

1. List your stakeholders.  Who’s affected by this initiative?  Who will support it, who might resist, and who needs to be brought along?
2. Get involvement early.  Don’t design in a vacuum and “roll out” later.  Involve key players from the start—especially frontline leaders and users.
3. Make it easy to do the right thing.  Design your systems, routines, and tools so that good practice becomes the path of least resistance.

People support what they help create. If you want your improvements to stick, build them with the people who’ll be using them.

Real World Case Study from My Maintenance and Reliability Career

Early in my career as a Maintenance Engineer at a chemical plant, I became obsessed with lubrication best practices. I had studied everything I could find on the subject and was eager to make improvements in the production area I supported.

I set my sights on a weekly PM lube route that assigned two mechanics for 8 hours every Monday. Based on my research, I knew this was excessive. I calculated optimal grease quantities and frequencies, observed the crew, and over a few weeks, redesigned the PM. The final result was a streamlined PM – one mechanic for four hours – a savings of over 600 labor hours and 300 tubes of grease per year! I was thrilled.

Then came the moment I handed the revised work order to Dave (not his real name), the crew’s frontline manager. Dave is one of the nicest, quietest, hardest-working people I know. When I handed him the new work order he just looked down at it for a long time.  While I was proudly explaining how much time I’d saved I gestured to the work order and noticed his hands were shaking.  I actually looked at his face and realized he was furious.  I heard myself trail off mid-sentence and I just stood there looking at his shaking hands.  Finally I said “Well… that’s the new work order.  I’ll see ya on Monday.” and I turned around and retreated back to my office. 

Weeks later, I found out what had happened.  Under pressure to maintain high schedule compliance, Dave had used the lube PM as a buffer that allowed his crew to complete small odd jobs Monday mornings without blowing up the schedule metrics.  My “optimized” change had thrown his entire week into chaos, and I hadn’t consulted him at all.

That moment stuck with me.  I had followed a best practice to the letter, but I’d missed the bigger picture.  I had neglected to consider how my changes would affect other areas of the maintenance system.  Managing stakeholders was an afterthought.  Perhaps if I had engaged Dave early on we could have worked together to tackle some bigger topics and make improvements.  At the very least, I could have avoided making a great guy so upset!  

Best Practices Aren’t the Goal – Results Are

Best practices are a means to an end. Not all are relevant. Not all are worth the effort in every situation. None work in isolation.

What matters is whether your efforts deliver business performance: reduced downtime, lower costs, improved throughput, and safer, more stable operations.

To get there, we need more than just knowledge—we need:

• Clear problem definitions
• Root cause analysis
• Strategic implementation
• Cross-functional alignment
• And a strong focus on people

That’s how you go beyond “knowing what to do” and start delivering results that matter.