Every plant has them. The same pump that trips production every quarter. The same valve that leaks just enough to stay under the radar, until it doesn’t, causing large efficiency losses. These are the “Bad Actors” of industrial reliability — and they’re costing you more than you think.
They show up in the form of repeat failures, chronic downtime, and constant patchwork fixes. Often, we tolerate them because “that’s just how it’s always been.” But make no mistake: bad actors are red flags, and when ignored, they quietly undermine safety, environmental compliance, customer relationships, employee engagement, earnings & trust.
What Is a “Bad Actor”?
In the world of industrial maintenance and reliability, a bad actor is an asset that fails more frequently or more severely than expected, and it brings along significant negative consequences, whether large events or many small events adding up. These assets disrupt operations, drain maintenance resources, and increase risk to employees, production capacity and customer satisfaction.
They aren’t always your oldest or most expensive assets. Sometimes, they’re deceptively simple: a corroded valve, a misaligned motor, equipment maintenance strategies not being managed, or a low-cost switch in a bad location. Other times, they’re major pieces of equipment that should be reliable but somehow aren’t.
What defines them is this: they cause repeat problems, and they don’t improve without intentional action.
Why Bad Actors Matter
Bad actors don’t just cost you parts and labor — they cost you trust with your employees, momentum, and customer satisfaction.
Inconsistent equipment performance often leads to missed shipments, quality variation, or unplanned shutdowns that ripple far beyond the plant walls. For many companies, one repeated failure can damage a customer relationship that took years to build. In today’s competitive supply chains, reliability is a promise to your customers, and bad actors break that promise.
Fighting the same failure every year isn’t maintenance — it’s surrender.
There’s also a major financial advantage: eliminating bad actors improves budget predictability. When assets fail repeatedly, the cost of replacement parts, expedited shipping, emergency labor, and unplanned downtime blows up the maintenance budget. On the flip side, when cyclical failures are eliminated, budgets stop reacting to chaos and start enabling strategy. Over time, many organizations see maintenance costs stabilize or even decrease, as fewer resources are spent fighting the same bad actors.
In one example, a team was fighting a losing battle with a critical gearbox. It supported a major production asset and failed once a year, without fail. Each time it went down, it took at least two full days of downtime with it. The replacement gearbox alone cost over $750,000, and the production losses made the real cost even higher. The team had given up on solving the problem and focused on speeding up change out upon failure.
One $750K gearbox. One failure a year. Millions lost — until someone said ‘enough.
What made it worse? That gearbox was designed & installed to last 15 to 20 years.
The issue wasn’t just mechanical. It was cultural. The repeated failures had become “normal.” Maintenance crews were constantly scrambling when this bad actor reared its head. Operations & Maintenance together were fearful and had adjusted their expectations. Nobody was winning.
Once it was treated as a bad actor — not just a nuisance — a long-term fix was engineered:
- Changed the gearbox to meet the true load demand
- Redesigned the base for better alignment and structural integrity
- Implemented predictive monitoring to catch early signs of stress and wear
The failures stopped. And just as important, the relief across the maintenance and operations teams was real. The energy that once went into firefighting each year was redirected toward improvement. That single bad actor elimination saved the company millions of dollars annually and tens of millions over the long term.
Why Bad Actors Are Often Ignored
If the impact of bad actors is so high, why don’t plants fix them sooner?
Because bad actors thrive in the gray zone between urgency and inertia.
They don’t always trigger alarms. They often fall below capital expense thresholds. They may not be tracked in a structured way, especially if the failure mode is resolved with routine work orders. Operators and techs may simply assume “that’s just how it is.”
Other common reasons include:
- Budget constraints (or fear of requesting budget) for the long-term fix
- Short-term thinking (“We’ll just keep a spare on hand”) and accept the failures
- Lack of failure data aggregation
- No structured method for bad actor identification or teamwork in elimination
How to Find Them
Finding bad actors requires both data and dialogue.
Start with:
- Work order history – Look for assets with the highest number of corrective or emergency work orders in the previous three years.
- MTBF analysis – Identify assets with failure intervals well below design expectations.
- Pareto charts – Focus on the 20% of assets causing 80% of unplanned downtime.
- Operator & Operations Leadership interviews – Ask “If you could fix or replace one piece of equipment, what would it be?” You’ll often hear the same few culprits from everyone.
Tools like CMMS dashboards, root cause analysis (RCA) tracking, and even Excel logs can reveal these patterns. But don’t overlook tribal knowledge — it often points you to the problems that the data hasn’t yet made visible.
How to Fix Them
Fixing a bad actor means going beyond the band-aid.
- Depending on the asset, you might need:
- Maintenance strategy review, Look for Preventive or Predictive strategies that are ineffective or missing: Often Lowest Cost
- Redesign or re-engineering to handle load, alignment, a change in operating context (like increasing rates above design), or environmental factors
- Upgraded materials or technology
- Root cause analysis or full kaizen with cross-functional input & technical failure validation
When teams invest in eliminating bad actors through engineering fixes, equipment maintenance strategy alignment, and predictive tools, the ROI shows up not just in uptime, but also in more efficient use of maintenance dollars.
The Power of Partnership Between Maintenance and Production
Identifying and eliminating bad actors isn’t just a maintenance task — it’s a team sport, and everyone must “Play to Win”.
The best solutions emerge when maintenance and production work together. Operators are on the front line with key maintenance roles & responsibilities and are the first to notice small changes: a machine that “sounds different” or a piece of equipment that behaves oddly during startup. Maintenance brings the tools, data, and expertise to investigate root causes and design improvements. They must work together to win.
Bad actors don’t stand a chance when maintenance and operations unite.
When these teams are aligned — sharing insights, walking the floor together, and focused on long-term wins — the impact is exponential. Bad actors are no match for a unified team with a shared mission: make the plant safer, more reliable, and more predictable for everyone.
Closing Thought: Fixing More Than Equipment
Bad actors are not just equipment problems — they’re symptoms of deeper reliability issues. They point to gaps in design, planning, strategy, and communication.
Fixing them does more than restore uptime. It builds trust. It sends the message that chronic problems don’t have to be tolerated. That things can and should get better.
So take a look around your plant. Ask the hard questions. Pull the work history. Talk to your people. Listen to your operators. Partner with your maintenance leads.
And when you find that one asset everyone rolls their eyes at — fix it, together.
You’ll gain more than reliability. You’ll gain momentum, credibility, and trust from your team, your customers, and your budget.
