Planned vs Unplanned Maintenance

In many of our industries, in an effort to continue production and "equipment available" time we develop maintenance schedules for all running equipment. Can we anticipate all breakdowns, probably not. However, we can predict many of them and since unplanned maintenance can cost up to 15 times as much as planned maintenance we need to look at it. What does downtime cost? A coal prep plant I work with costs $52,000/hour. A longwall mining machine can be $600/second to $12,000/hour. A chemical plant as much as $150,000/hour. Continually looking at maintenance schedules with the idea of planning as much as possible and anticipating as much as possible is money well spent. Achieving high productivity numbers is the direct result of planned and predictive maintenance programs designed to keep as much equipment as possible running and elimionate unscheduled down time.