My father is an industrial engineer/ manager (retired). He spent his career in maintenance and operations management, and growing up, I absorbed a principle so fundamental that it shaped how I see the world: if you want something to last, you have to look after it.
It wasn’t complicated philosophy. It was watching him maintain the family car religiously—not because it was broken, but because he understood what neglect would cost later. It was seeing him make sure the wooden fence always had a healthy coating of Carbolineum and the gutters were cleared before the rainy season arrived. The lesson was simple: care for things before they demand it, and they’ll serve you well. Ignore them, and they’ll fail you at the worst possible moment.
This principle is obvious to anyone who’s grown up around machinery. Yet somehow, in the complexity of industrial operations, it gets lost. Maintenance teams fight for resources, justify their existence, and struggle to communicate their value to organisations that measure success in tonnes and throughput. Production teams, under relentless pressure to hit targets, see maintenance as a necessary interruption at best—and an obstacle at worst.
The root of this disconnect isn’t ignorance or bad intention. It’s something more fundamental: the success of maintenance is invisible.
The Problem with Preventing Problems
Consider what happens when maintenance does its job perfectly. Equipment runs. Production flows. Targets are met. And nobody thinks about maintenance at all.
Now consider what happens when maintenance fails—or when years of deferred work finally catch up. A critical conveyor seizes. A pump fails catastrophically. A gearbox that should have been rebuilt six months ago now takes the whole plant down for emergency repairs. Suddenly, everyone is thinking about maintenance. Usually with frustration.
This creates a painful asymmetry. Maintenance is invisible when it succeeds and highly visible when it fails. The breakdown that never happened—the one prevented by a bearing change, an oil analysis catch, or a vibration trend acted upon—generates no celebration, no recognition, no data point in the monthly report. It simply doesn’t exist.
Production celebrates record shifts. Sales celebrates contracts won. Finance celebrates costs reduced. But how do you celebrate a failure that was prevented? How do you point to something that didn’t happen and say, “That’s what we achieved”?
You can’t. And that’s the core challenge maintenance professionals face every day.
Two Worlds, Two Languages
Walk into any site and you’ll find two groups of people who see the same equipment completely differently.
Production sees assets as capacity. The crusher processes tonnes. The haul truck moves material. The conveyor connects A to B. Equipment is a means to an end—the end being output, schedule adherence, and meeting the plan. When production looks at a machine, they see what it can do today.
Maintenance sees assets as systems with finite lives. The crusher has bearings that wear, liners that erode, and a gearbox that accumulates fatigue with every tonne processed. The haul truck has an engine approaching its rebuild interval, suspension components under stress, and a transmission that’s showing early signs of trouble. When maintenance looks at a machine, they see what it will need tomorrow.
These aren’t wrong perspectives. They’re incomplete perspectives. And when each group optimises for their own view without understanding the other, conflict is inevitable.
Production asks: “Can we delay that shutdown? We’re behind on the monthly target.”
Maintenance thinks: “If we delay, we’re risking a failure that will cost ten times more than the planned repair.”
Production asks: “Why does maintenance cost so much when the equipment is running fine?”
Maintenance thinks: “It’s running fine because of what we’re spending. Stop spending, and see what happens.”
These conversations happen on every site, in every industry. They’re rarely resolved well, because each side is speaking a different language about a different time horizon with different measures of success.
Making the Invisible Visible
If the core problem is that maintenance success is invisible, then the solution must involve making it visible. Not with defensive justifications or complex reliability engineering metrics that nobody outside the maintenance department understands—but with language and concepts that connect to what the whole organisation cares about.
1. Track cost avoidance, not just cost incurred.
Every maintenance budget report shows what was spent. Very few show what was saved. Yet every proactive repair, every condition-based intervention, every failure prevented represents cost avoided—often dramatically more than the cost of the work itself.
A $15,000 gearbox rebuild done during a planned shutdown is mundane. A $15,000 gearbox rebuild done as emergency work—with express freight, overtime labour, and three days of lost production—might cost $300,000 when you tally the full impact. The $285,000 difference is real value created by doing the work proactively. But if you’re not tracking it, it doesn’t exist.
Start building a library of “what it would have cost” scenarios. Use your own failure history and industry data to estimate the consequence of failures prevented. When you can say, “This year’s planned maintenance program avoided an estimated $2.4 million in potential failures,” you’re speaking in terms the whole organisation understands.
2. Connect maintenance metrics to production outcomes.
Maintenance departments often report metrics that matter deeply to maintenance professionals but mean little to anyone else. PM completion rates. Backlog hours. MTBF and MTTR. These are important internal measures, but they don’t answer the question production and leadership are actually asking: “Is the equipment going to be there when we need it?”
Translate your work into availability, reliability, and readiness. Instead of “we completed 94% of scheduled PMs,” say “our mobile fleet availability was 89% against a target of 85%, supporting the achievement of this month’s movement targets.” Connect what you do to what the operation is trying to achieve.
3. Make risk visible before it becomes failure.
Production operates in the present. The truck either works today or it doesn’t. The conveyor either runs this shift or it’s a problem. This present-focus isn’t a flaw—it’s a necessity when you’re trying to meet immediate targets.
Maintenance, however, can see the future—or at least, the probable futures. Vibration trends, oil analysis, thermography, equipment age, and operating context all provide signals about what’s likely to happen next. This is valuable intelligence, but only if it’s communicated in a way that prompts action.
Don’t bury warnings in technical reports. Elevate them. Create simple, visual risk registers that show “equipment approaching intervention threshold” in terms that production can engage with. When you can show that three haul trucks will need major work in the next 60 days, and here’s the production impact if we do it planned versus unplanned, you’re giving production the information they need to make good decisions rather than just asking them to trust you.
The Conversation That Needs to Happen
Beyond metrics and reporting, bridging the maintenance-production divide requires something more fundamental: genuine understanding of each other’s world.
Maintenance professionals need to understand what production is up against. The pressure to hit targets isn’t arbitrary—it connects to contracts, commitments, cash flow, and ultimately jobs. When production asks to delay a shutdown, they’re not being reckless; they’re trying to solve a problem with the information they have. Your job isn’t to judge that pressure but to help them navigate it with better information.
Production professionals need to understand what maintenance is managing. Every piece of equipment is running down its remaining life with every operating hour. Maintenance isn’t “making work” when they propose interventions—they’re trying to control when and how failures happen rather than letting failures control the operation. Every delay trades short-term convenience for long-term risk.
The best operations I’ve seen don’t treat this as maintenance versus production. They create shared accountability for asset performance—which means production owns equipment care between maintenance interventions, and maintenance owns equipment readiness to support production plans. Both groups plan together, review performance together, and make trade-off decisions together.
This doesn’t happen automatically. It requires leadership that refuses to let the two functions operate in silos. It requires shared KPIs that neither group can achieve without the other. And it requires regular, structured conversations where maintenance and production sit down and ask: “What do you need from us, and what’s getting in the way?”
The Long Game
My father understood something that’s easy to forget in the noise of daily targets and monthly reports: you’re not just running equipment today—you’re deciding what condition it will be in next year, and the year after that.
Every time maintenance is deferred, you’re borrowing capacity from the future. Sometimes that’s the right trade-off. Often it’s not. But it should always be a conscious decision made with clear eyes about the cost.
Organisations that get this right don’t see maintenance as a cost to be minimised. They see it as an investment in future capability—in equipment that will be there when it’s needed, in operations that aren’t hostage to unexpected failures, in a workforce that can plan their work rather than react to emergencies.
The value of good maintenance is real, even when it’s invisible. A plant that runs smoothly isn’t lucky—it’s the result of thousands of decisions made well, thousands of problems anticipated and addressed, thousands of failures that never happened because someone was paying attention.
The challenge for maintenance professionals isn’t just to do this work—it’s to help everyone else understand why it matters. Not through defensive justifications, but through clear communication that connects what we do to what the organisation cares about.
My father knew that looking after things wasn’t glamorous work. But he also knew it was the difference between equipment that served you for decades and equipment that let you down when you needed it most.
That lesson is as true on a mine site as it was in our garage. The only question is whether we can communicate it clearly enough for everyone to act on it.
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