Asset Availability

You bought an industrial peanut desheller. Paid $10 million for it. But you skrimped on maintenance. So now it's off an eighth of an inch and well, basically, peanut butter is clogging the machine, so you have to take it down for cleaning every other week.

Not only does taking that asset offline cost you time and money, it has made your vendors start to question your reliability in delivering the 10,000 pounds of peanuts you've been selling them for years. So your brand is getting tarnished and bad things are on the horizon for the future of Tortugaville.

If you spend big capital on an asset, the financial story rarely ends there...bad managers don't make accommodation for the needed maintenance, care, love, and feeding that big beast machines always seem to need.

There should be easy math that covers something like, "If I spend $10,000 a month on maintenance, then the machine should be up and working 4 more days a month - are those 4 days worth $2,500 in profitable throughput to the company?" If the answer is "yes" or something even close to "yes" then...yeah, go for it.