Deferred Maintenance

A Resource Allocation Strategy

Published March 2005 A plan of attack to keep deferred maintenance spending under control.

At Tradeline's New Management & Operations Strategies for Technically Complex Facilities Conference 2005, a strategy was proposed for dealing with deferred maintenance: To attack the deferred maintenance problem, implement a system to avoid the 1/3 of maintenance spending that is being spent unnecessarily, and check to make sure that at least 80 percent of your maintenance time and money is going toward planned (as opposed to unplanned) maintenance. Deferred maintenance is the practice of allowing machinery or infrastructure to deteriorate by postponing prudent but non-essential repairs to save cost, labor and/or material. The failure to perform needed repair, maintenance, and renewal by normal maintenance management creates deferred maintenance. Generally, a policy of continuing deferred maintenance will results in higher costs or failure than if normal maintenance had occurred.