Solving Maintenance Budgeting Challenges

Maintenance Budgeting Challenges affect some of the largest companies in the world.  In asset-intensive organizations, maintenance tends to be one of the larger cost centers, but too often its spending is among the least well managed. It’s not that they don’t try; they just lack the right tools.

Asking a maintenance planner or supervisor to predict their next year’s spending, and deliver it in a manner that the finance team finds useful, is self-defeating. They don’t have the time or motivation to properly capture the data, the tools to compile it, or the know-how to translate it into the proper general ledger (G/L) accounts or corporate cost structures. As a result, maintenance budgets often end up being a series of very large lump sum amounts that are highly inaccurate and non-specific.

Those who attempt to create a maintenance budget will spend substantial hours crunching the numbers in homegrown tools, simple spreadsheets, or inflexible corporate budgeting systems. The finance group will dutifully load the maintenance budget into their financial accounting system and attempt to manage against it.