18 Common Lies We Tell Ourselves About Maintenance and Reliability

Every maintenance and reliability professional has heard them, and if we’re honest, we’ve probably repeated a few ourselves. These comforting falsehoods become embedded in our plant culture, passed down from shift to shift until they feel like wisdom rather than wishful thinking. They’re the stories we tell ourselves when budgets are tight, when breakdowns happen, or when we need to justify why things are the way they are.

But these lies cost us in downtime, in safety incidents, in wasted resources, and in the slow erosion of our equipment’s potential lifespan. Breaking free from these patterns starts with recognition.

The 18 Common Lies

1. “We can catch up on PMs next month.” Preventive Maintenance is not a suggestion; it is a debt payment. Skipping PMs today compounds the “interest” in the form of accelerated wear and tear, leading to a catastrophic breakdown that will cost 3-10 times the original labor hours, depending on the asset and failure mode, with additional costs in lost production and safety risks.
2. “Our plant is unique; standard best practices don’t apply here.” Physics does not change based on your zip code or your product. While your operational context varies, the principles of lubrication, alignment, and precision maintenance are universal constants.
3. “The OEM manual is the absolute gold standard for our maintenance intervals.” While the OEM manual is the necessary baseline for warranty compliance and initial startup, it is often a generic guide. OEM intervals may be conservative (to protect warranty exposure) or optimistic (to reduce perceived operating costs during the sales process). A mature strategy must evolve through Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) principles, using your site’s specific failure data and environmental conditions to optimize intervals.
4. “We don’t have time to do it right, but we have time to do it over.” This is the mantra of the reactive plant. If you don’t have the two hours required for a precision alignment today, you certainly don’t have the twelve hours required to replace the motor and pump when they fail prematurely next week.
5. “Adding more grease is always better than not enough.” Over-greasing is a silent killer of bearings. Excess grease creates churning resistance that generates heat, builds pressure that can blow seals, and in extreme cases, can actually starve rolling elements of proper lubrication. Precision lubrication requires the right volume at the right interval—typically filling bearing cavities only 30-50% full for most applications.
6. “A ‘clean’ shop floor is just for show.” Workplace organization (5S) is a leading indicator of reliability. If a technician cannot find a calibrated torque wrench in a messy shop, they will likely use an uncalibrated one, leading to infant mortality in repaired assets.
7. “Our CMMS is a waste of time; it’s just data entry.” A Computerized Maintenance Management System is only a “black hole” because the data being put in is poor. Without an accurate work order history, you are flying blind, unable to justify capital expenditures or identify “bad actor” equipment.
8. “Root Cause Analysis (RCA) takes too long for small failures.” Not every failure requires a week-long investigation, but every failure requires a “root cause mindset.” Even a simple “5-Why” analysis on repetitive minor issues can prevent the chronic drains on resources that eventually evolve into major safety incidents.
9. “We can’t afford a Predictive Maintenance (PdM) program.” The cost of a vibration analyzer or an infrared camera is negligible compared to the cost of one unplanned outage on a critical asset. Most facilities see ROI on PdM programs within 6-18 months. You are already paying for PdM through the cost of your failures; you just aren’t getting the benefits.
10. “Operators don’t need to know how the machine works, just how to run it.” Operators are your first line of defense. Industry benchmarks suggest that Autonomous Maintenance – training operators to perform basic inspections and cleaning – can detect up to 70% of developing failures early in their progression (per TPM benchmarks), allowing maintenance intervention before breakdown. The actual prevention rate depends on response speed and quality of operator training.
11. “Brand new parts are always reliable.” Reliability engineering recognizes the “Bathtub Curve,” where failure risk is elevated during the initial “infant mortality” period due to manufacturing defects, installation errors, and break-in issues. Without rigorous acceptance testing and precision installation, a new component is often more likely to fail than the “conditioned” part it replaced.
12. “We have a spare, so we don’t need to worry about that asset.” A spare is a safety net, not a strategy. Without a Care and Preservation program (e.g., periodic shaft rotation to prevent bearing damage from static loads and vibration-induced fretting, along with desiccant checks to control humidity), your “backup” is likely deteriorating on the shelf and may fail immediately upon installation.
13. “Vibration analysis is just ‘voodoo’ science.” Vibration, thermography, and oil analysis are the “MRIs” of the industrial world. They provide a window into the machine’s health that the human ear and eye cannot see until it is far too late.
14. “The ‘Old Timers’ know everything, so we don’t need written procedures.” Tribal knowledge is a risk, not an asset. When your most experienced technician retires, their 30 years of “feel” and “intuition” walk out the door with them. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are essential for consistency.
15. “Reliability is the Maintenance Department’s job.” Reliability results from design, procurement, operation, and maintenance -the entire asset lifecycle. Reliability begins at design specification, not at commissioning. If Procurement buys the cheapest bearings and Operations runs the machine at 110% capacity, Maintenance cannot “repair” the asset into being reliable.
16. “We’ll fix the leaks during the next turnaround.” Air, steam, and oil leaks are pure profit bleeding out of your system. Ignoring them creates a culture where “leaks are normal,” which eventually leads to ignored safety hazards and massive utility waste.
17. “Emergency work is just part of the job.” While some emergencies are inevitable, world-class plants target 90-95% planned work, with 80-90% of that work also scheduled in advance (per SMRP Best Practices). If your day is dominated by “firefighting,” you have lost control of the schedule, and your costs are typically 2-5 times higher than a well-planned maintenance program, according to maintenance benchmarking studies.
18. “We’ll start our reliability journey once things calm down.” Things will never “calm down” until you start the journey. Reliability is the tool you use to create the calm, not a reward you receive for surviving the storm.

Moving Forward

Recognizing these lies is uncomfortable because it means accepting that many of our challenges are self-inflicted. But that recognition is also empowering – self-inflicted problems can be self-corrected.

The path to better reliability doesn’t require revolutionary technology or massive capital investment. It requires honesty about where we are, clarity about where we need to go, and the discipline to stop telling ourselves comforting lies that justify the status quo. The equipment doesn’t care about our excuses. It responds only to how we actually treat it.