Part 1 of Maintenance Management Re-envisioned: From Cost Center to Strategic Advantage

[Tara Holwegner:
00:00
Fun. Hello, listeners, and thank you for joining me on another episode of Get Smarter, a Lifecycle Engineering podcast. I have a really special guest today—one of my favorite people on the planet—Keith Mobley, a thought leader and executive advisor. Keith has over sixty years of experience.

01:00
He’s combined business, finance, engineering, and consulting. He has over twenty-five years in corporate positions, including executive and CEO roles. He’s a Master Black Belt and has written over twenty-five books. If you’re listening to this podcast, I’m sure you’ve read at least one of them. He’s contributed to the Maintenance Engineering Handbook and has been a contributing writer and editor to top industry trade publications for over thirty years. In this episode, we’re going to sit down with Keith—a veteran, a legend in industrial maintenance and reliability—and talk about a bold new vision. Not a new vision, just a bold one that Keith has for maintenance management. He’s released a second edition of his book, Maintenance Management Reenvisioned, and in it, he advocates for letting go of legacy practices that keep organizations trapped in what we call the cycle of reactivity. So thank you so much, Keith, for being a guest on our podcast. Welcome.

Keith Mobley:
02:00
Thank you. I’m very glad to be here. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to work with Lifecycle, and I’ve been looking forward to it, quite frankly. Just as a piece of trivia—it’s going to be twenty-six books by around December. The ninth edition of the Maintenance Engineering Handbook is in final publishing stage right now. So that’ll make it twenty-six. And your new leader was actually involved in producing part of it. Dave Morowe did part of the reliability engineering tools section. So Lifecycle is still involved in the Maintenance Engineering Handbook as well.

03:00
Just a little background about the book—it’s an eBook, not a hardcover. It was developed as a training tool, a reference manual if you will, for a year-long Maintenance Excellence or Maintenance Manager Certification course that we’ve been teaching for the last twelve years for a Southern university. The course is eight sessions, each two days long, spread over a year. The whole focus is to help maintenance managers—and those who want to be—understand how to run a sustainable, effective maintenance program. We just updated it earlier this year, in 2025, for the second edition. It’s about 500 pages—if you’re looking for some light reading. You could be like the gentleman from Korea I met years ago at a hydrocarbon conference in Houston. I ran into him at the breakfast buffet, and he walked up to me and said, “Are you Keith Mobley?” I said, “Yes, sir, I am.” He said, “I have all your books in my toilet.” I said, “I beg your pardon?” He replied, “I keep all your books in my toilet.” And I’m standing there thinking—is this a statement about the quality of my writing? But what he meant was—that was his library.

Tara Holwegner:
04:00
That was his library! I mean, you know, it’s thoughtful. That is…

Keith Mobley:
It stopped me in my tracks for a minute. So I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking you can go to Barnes & Noble or somewhere like that to get a copy of the book. It’s available through Lifecycle for anyone who wants to read it. It’s fully indexed so you can navigate it easily. But the reason it was put together is because of our philosophy—and this aligns with Lifecycle’s philosophy too: if you’re going to teach a course for mastery, people won’t remember everything they learned. They need something to take with them that will reinforce what they learned a year, two years, or even three years later. That’s why the manual was written. I just wanted to clarify that.

Tara Holwegner:
05:00
Yes! You’re on track. Actually, you’re one of our first guests to open with a joke, and I’m loving it. This definitely won’t be the last time you’re on the podcast. Thank you for the introduction to your book. We’re going to talk more about it, which I confess—I’ve started reading. But it’s almost 500 pages, so I haven’t made it through the whole thing yet. It has tons of chapters, so you can find what you need. Like you said, it’s easy to pinpoint a reference when you need it. But I want to step back a little bit in this episode. I want to talk about early Keith Mobley—young Roland Keith Mobley. You’ve had a decades-long career dedicated to maintenance and reliability improvement, and asset management. What first drew you to this field of manufacturing, maintenance, reliability, and engineering? And how has your perspective evolved over time?

Keith Mobley:
06:00
I’m sitting here smiling. Literally, it’s part of my DNA. My father was a millwright. And before I could walk, all I remember is his utter and total frustration with what he called “baling wire and Band-Aids maintenance.” I was born in 1943, right in the middle of World War II. My dad lived and breathed maintenance. He loved machines. He worked until he was 65 and never missed a day of work in his life. He felt like the plant depended on him—maintenance was his life. But he was frustrated because he knew the patchwork maintenance they were doing wasn’t right. They were forced into it because of the war. The mandate was: “Keep the plant running, no matter what. If it blows up, replace it. Just run it. Don’t worry about sustainability or proper maintenance.” He used to say, “If there’s ever a lull, we’ll come back and take off all the Band-Aids and bailing wire and do proper maintenance.” But then he’d add, “Son, I’ve learned that if there ever is a lull, the first thing they’ll do is lay off maintenance. So the Band-Aids will never come off.”

07:00
I was young, so it went in one ear and out the other. But by the time I was 10, I knew I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. That was my passion—machines.

Tara Holwegner:
I like machines too.

Keith Mobley:
It was in my DNA—what can I say? I worked my way through NC State as a “pitcher.” For those who don’t know, that’s a maintenance technician who responds to callouts. If a problem develops, you go fix it. Otherwise, you can study or hang out in the break room. As a student, that was great. But looking back, it was a huge waste of time and money for the company. There were things I could’ve been doing when the bell wasn’t going off.

Keith Mobley:
07:00
I was young, so it went in one ear and out the other. But by the time I was 10, I knew I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. That was my passion—machines.

Tara Holwegner:
I like machines too.

Keith Mobley:
It was in my DNA—what can I say? I worked my way through NC State as a “pitcher.” For those who don’t know, that’s a maintenance technician who responds to callouts. If a problem develops, you go fix it. Otherwise, you can study or hang out in the break room. As a student, that was great. But looking back, it was a huge waste of time and money for the company. There were things I could’ve been doing when the bell wasn’t going off.

08:00
So that got me thinking—maybe this reactive model isn’t the right way to do things. When I graduated, I was brain-dead. I’d done four years in three—actually five in three. I needed a break, so I applied for a maintenance job. I didn’t want to think. I went to a plant down the road from my parents’ house. It was a division of Rubbermaid, making plastic back when polypropylene was just starting out. I applied, and while I was waiting, the plant manager came out and said, “I can’t hire you.” I asked why. He said, “You’re overqualified.” I explained, “I just need time to recharge.” He said, “Still, it wouldn’t be smart. But we do need a maintenance engineer.”

09:00
So my first job out of school was as a maintenance engineer. From there, I became a maintenance manager. And I’ve been trying to get away from maintenance ever since! I went to my high school reunion—don’t ask which one—and I hadn’t seen my classmates in at least two decades. I walked into the room and someone said, “Oh, you’re the maintenance expert.” I can’t get away from it. It’s literally part of my DNA. But what I found when I got into the maintenance function was that my dad was right—baling wire and Band-Aids were still alive and well.

Tara Holwegner:
Oh wow.

Keith Mobley:
To use your words, Tara, I’ve been preaching ever since that this is not the right way. It’s not the smart way. I didn’t come to the idea of “maintenance management reenvisioned” until about five years ago. It was an evolution—an epiphany that came gradually over time.

10:00
That was a long-winded way of answering your first question.

Tara Holwegner:
No, no—it’s a perfect segue into my next one. In your book, you talk about the need to let go of outdated practices and philosophies that are still pervasive in today’s maintenance and manufacturing programs. Tell me more about that. What are the practices we need to release ourselves from? And what’s the new thinking—or maybe not even new thinking—that we need to embrace?

Keith Mobley:
It’s not really new thinking. You’d need to read the book for the full background—we can’t make this podcast long enough for me to do it justice. But let me give you a few simple examples. I’m not the brightest star in the universe by any stretch of the imagination. But to me, if you’re going to do anything to make money—whether it’s running a kiosk in a mall or managing a maintenance organization—the first thing you need to do is define what you’re going to do.

11:00
You need a mission. We’ve been teaching that certification course for over 12 years. In the very first session, we ask maintenance managers and aspiring managers: “What is the mission of the maintenance organization?” I have yet to hear anyone answer it correctly. Most people—including senior VPs—will say, “Maintenance is here to serve the plant.”

Tara Holwegner:
So we’re a servant. Maintenance is a servant.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. Our job is to do whatever production needs to produce products. But that’s not the right mindset. And if you ask nine out of ten maintenance managers, that will be their answer.
12:00
But it was an evolution. It was an epiphany. It was a gradual evolution over time—realizing that these things we’re doing just aren’t right. They’re the wrong things to do.

Tara Holwegner:
No, no, no. It’s a perfect segue into my next one, which is—in your book, I want to pull more on this evolution you mentioned. You talk about how we need to let go, but that some of these outdated practices and philosophies are still pervasive in today’s maintenance and manufacturing programs. Talk to me more about that. What are the practices we need to release ourselves from? And what’s the new thinking we need to embrace?

Keith Mobley:
13:00
It’s not even new thinking. It’s really taking us back. You need to read the book for the background—we can’t extend this podcast long enough for me to do it justice. But let me give you a few simple examples.

If you’re going to do anything to make money—whether it’s running a kiosk in a mall or managing a maintenance organization—the first thing you’ve got to do is define what you’re going to do. You need a mission.

We’ve been teaching that course I mentioned for over twelve years. In the very first session, we ask maintenance managers and aspiring managers: “What is the mission of the maintenance organization?” I have yet to hear anyone answer it correctly.

14:00
What you typically get—and this isn’t just maintenance managers, you can ask a senior VP—is: “Maintenance is here to serve the plant.” That’s the most popular answer. Not the correct one.

Tara Holwegner:
So we’re a servant. Maintenance is a servant.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. Our job is to do whatever production needs to produce products. But that’s not the right mindset. And if you ask nine out of ten maintenance managers, that will be their answer.

15:00
The second biggest problem is that most maintenance programs are set up to prevent failures—but not in the way you might think. If you look at Lifecycle’s database of client assessments, you’ll see that many of those programs are built around failure prevention.

Tara Holwegner:
Yes.

Keith Mobley:
Almost all of them. One reason is RCM—Reliability-Centered Maintenance. It’s all about the PF curve. You pick the probable or possible point of failure, and then…

Tara Holwegner:
…track it, right.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. All you do with PF is identify when there’s a probability of failure and how long it’ll take to get there. Not one thought is given to extending that line.

16:00
Nothing in legacy maintenance practices is aimed at preventing failure—it’s just about tracking degradation. It doesn’t correct it. It doesn’t stop it.

Tara Holwegner:
You’re right—it tracks degradation.

Keith Mobley:
There was a steel company in Canada we assessed years ago. They spent tens of millions of dollars on RCM trying to prevent failures—and got nothing in return. Literally no benefit. But that’s still the most popular approach.

A little less popular, but still common, is the idea that maintenance exists to manage the budget. You’re given X dollars for the year—don’t go over.

17:00
But those budgets have no relevance to the actual work that needs to be done. They’re based on arbitrary numbers from years ago. Each year, you add a little for inflation…

Tara Holwegner:
Seven percent, whatever.

Keith Mobley:
Right. And you know leadership will cut a percentage, so you try to guess what that will be and pad your budget accordingly. But again, it has no connection to the real maintenance needs.

Tara Holwegner:
Or the type of maintenance you want to do. And what we were talking about earlier—sorry, listeners, Keith and I had some side conversations—about maintenance CapEx.

Keith Mobley:
18:00
Exactly. That’s another issue. Because we’re deferring maintenance—either because production won’t give us the line, or we don’t have the budget, or we don’t have the right talent—we’re just not doing the preventive work we should be doing.

And the saying “pay me now or pay me later” is absolutely true. If you don’t do the work when it’s scheduled, the cost later will be substantial.

Back in the ’50s and ’60s, Fram—an oil filter company—ran a TV ad with a mechanic holding a dirty filter. He’d say, “You can pay me five dollars now for this filter, or five thousand dollars later for a new engine.”

19:00
That’s what deferred maintenance does. And it drives up maintenance CapEx—which, in case anyone doesn’t know, is the capital money you have to spend just to replace a worn-out asset. It doesn’t add volume or revenue—it just keeps you where you are.

If you let an asset wear out in 10 years when it should’ve lasted 20, you’ll have to replace it twice in that time instead of once.

Tara Holwegner:
That’s a great segue. I want to talk about lifecycle asset management. You’re saying that if something should’ve lasted 20 years, but you ran it into the ground, you’ve lost that value.

Can you explain what lifecycle asset management really means?

Keith Mobley:
20:00
Sure. I’ll break it into two parts.

First, asset management is an enterprise-level initiative. To do true lifecycle asset management, it has to start in the boardroom. Leadership has to commit to designing quality equipment that’s as reliable as current technology allows.

You have to install it correctly, commission it properly, and from that day forward, every function—operations, maintenance, engineering, procurement—has to be committed to maximizing the economic useful life of that asset.

Keith Mobley:
21:00
If you do that—if you extend the useful life even just to the normal design life, which ranges anywhere from 10 to 30 years depending on the asset—you reduce the total cost of ownership. You can’t waste money.

For example, between 38% and 42% of the dollars currently being spent on maintenance have no value.

Tara Holwegner:
I’m sorry—what?

Keith Mobley:
Yeah, you heard that right. If you look at the maintenance activities companies are doing, 38% to 42% add no value.

Tara Holwegner:
That’s almost half!

Keith Mobley:
22:00
Let me give you a simple example. We worked with a facility about 15 or 20 years ago. They had a work order to lubricate the drive chain on a drag-out conveyor in a spent fuel lagoon. It took four technicians eight hours once a month to do this job. They’d been doing it for 15 years.

But when we looked at the work order, we saw that two-thirds of the chain was submerged in water that had a high percentage of aviation fuel—so it was basically self-lubricating. And they were using water-soluble grease to lubricate it.

Tara Holwegner:
You’ve got to be kidding me.

Keith Mobley:
23:00
That’s four people for a full day of work—every month—for 15 years. And I could give you, if we had three or four days on this podcast, several thousand examples like that.

Here’s another simple one. On many PM task lists, you’ll see something like: “Inspect B belt tension and correct as necessary.”

Tara Holwegner:
I’ve seen that on a PM job plan. Yes, sir.

Keith Mobley:
How do you do that?

Tara Holwegner:
We don’t know.

Keith Mobley:
24:00
I asked a maintenance manager once, “How do you do that?” He said, “Well, you go out to the midpoint on the B belt, press down, and if it depresses one knuckle on your finger, the tension is right.”
Now, I’ve got short, stubby fingers. Whose first digit matters—yours or mine?

It’s things like this. You tell a technician to “inspect the tank.” What does that mean? They go out, look at it, and say, “Yep, still here.” Where’s the value in that?

Or on the other end, you get a recommendation from a vendor for a high-speed packaging machine that says: after 20,000 hours of operation, you need to do a rebuild. Because the wear parts will be consumed by then. And you don’t do it.

25:00
What happens? You go into parent material. Now what would’ve been a $50,000 rebuild becomes a $1.5 million replacement.

And we don’t understand what we’re supposed to be doing. I mentioned “preventive maintenance” earlier—here’s the problem: preventive maintenance doesn’t have a clear definition.

It ranges from “I’ll lubricate the equipment when I remember” to very exotic inspections and tasks. But mostly, it’s inspections.

Tara Holwegner:
Right.

Keith Mobley:
26:00
The problem is, you don’t know what you’re looking for.

I’ll tell on myself. My first job as a maintenance engineer, my boss—Claude Meadows—told me, “Every morning when you come in at 6 a.m., I want you to walk through all the equipment in the plant. Find anything that might bite us.”

He said, “If you come back clean, I’ll know you didn’t do your job.”

So I took him seriously. I crawled over, under, and around everything. I came back looking like Smokey the Bear. But we were still having breakdowns.

Tara Holwegner:
Right, you couldn’t figure out how to solve the problem.

Keith Mobley:
27:00
I was getting more and more frustrated. Claude just sat back, grinning. Eventually, he said, “You know what your problem is?” I said, “No, help me.” He said, “You don’t know what you’re looking for.”

And he was right. I didn’t.

That’s the biggest problem with all that wasted effort—we don’t know what to look for. We don’t know the telltale signs that a machine is in trouble.

Let me give you an example. In a FedEx sorting center, there are flapper valves that divert packages based on what the sensors see. The timing of those valves is critical.

28:00
The solenoid actuators that control them are good for about a million cycles. After that, they start losing hysteresis—they fire slower and with less energy. That causes jams.

What’s the maintenance response? Go clear the jam.

Tara Holwegner:
Right.

Keith Mobley:
But no one thinks about the solenoids. So the jam happens again. And again.

What’s missing is periodic replacement. Every machine has finite-life parts—wear rings, solenoids, V-belts, O-rings. If you don’t change them, you’ll keep having minor stoppages. But you never fix the root cause. You just clear the jam and move on.

Tara Holwegner:
Baling wire and Band-Aids.

Keith Mobley:
29:00
Exactly.

Now, the second half of this is that maintenance plays a key role in asset management. There are things we can do within the maintenance organization to get the ball rolling.

But we can’t make it global. We can’t make it holistic. We can’t change how production operates. We can’t stop procurement from buying off-spec parts. We can’t make HR hire qualified people.

We can only control what’s within our span of control.

30:00
The good news is: as long as you stay within budget and production meets its forecast, you can manage your maintenance organization however you want.

You can create asset management within the framework of maintenance. You can lay out a plan based on the economic useful life of your assets.

But you’ve got to change some things.

For example, let’s talk about planning and scheduling. Every work request that comes in is treated like gold. Whether it’s Tara saying she’s cold and wants a space heater, or a machine that’s about to break down—it all goes through the same process.

That’s wrong.

Tara Holwegner:
Totally.

Keith Mobley:
31:00
And in almost every maintenance planning and scheduling course, they teach that you shouldn’t have more than 2–4 weeks of ready backlog and 4–6 weeks of total backlog.

That’s crazy.

If I’ve got an asset with a 30-year useful life, I should know what work needs to be done on it for the next 30 years.

Let’s bring it down to a fiscal year. You’ve got 12 months. Can you adjust your budget or staffing mid-year?

Tara Holwegner:
You don’t. You can’t.

Keith Mobley:
Exactly. You plan your budget for 52 weeks. So if you’re only planning and scheduling for 2–4 weeks, you’re not aligning with your budget or your asset strategy.

Tara Holwegner:
32:00
I see what you’re saying. That makes total sense. And it ties back to what you said earlier—lifecycle asset management isn’t just maintenance. It’s a culture. It’s a mindset. It’s a…

Keith Mobley:
Philosophy.

Tara Holwegner:
A philosophy.