Not where the budget says it leaves. Thirty years on the tools, in almost every kind of plant there is. I walk your operation and show you the recurring costs that never make it onto a drawing.
The expensive losses in a plant are almost never one big failure. They're the small recurring ones that nobody ever put a number on, so nobody was ever accountable for them.
The readiness hole that turns a scheduled window into a week. The coordination cost nobody counts. The spares policy that reports condition good on a motor that's already destroyed. The PM route that gets signed off without being walked, because six of its forty tasks are physically miserable.
Every one of those shows up on the books every year. Every one of them is findable in a few days by somebody who knows what to look at.
And here's the part owners don't like hearing: you can't run this audit in your own building. Not because the method is hard. Because the walk-down means asking a tradesman what happened the last time you brought this up, and the honest answer to that question doesn't exist for the man who signs the cheques.
An on-site look at where your operation is losing money: stores, purchasing, freight, how work actually moves, shutdowns, and the systems that are supposed to tie it together. Every dollar is traced to your own numbers.
For greenfield builds and major capital projects. The maintenance architecture looked at before the concrete is poured, by somebody who has spent his working life on the wrong end of those decisions.
Software, systems, AI included: which ones actually fit your plant and which ones are just being sold to it. Most of the time the fix is a standard, a route, or a decision somebody finally owns.
Before I set foot on site, I ask for the numbers a plant should already have: downtime cost, freight, the work order history, inventory movement, the last shutdown. Whatever can't be produced is a finding in itself. It usually means nobody has ever been accountable for that cost.
On site, on the floor, talking to the people who do the work. Alone and unsupervised, because a manager standing beside me changes the answers.
Written in plain language. It goes after the system, never the person. Every figure traces back to your own number, the arithmetic is shown step by step, and where a number couldn't be built I say so rather than guess.
In order of what they return. Most of them are a standard, a route, a reservation system, or somebody owning a decision nobody has owned. Few of them need new equipment, and fewer still need software.
The second cheapest time is never, because after that you're paying for it every year for thirty years.
Most of what a maintenance department spends its life on was decided on a drawing, years before the first shift. A module no crane can reach. A lockout that needs three sets of paperwork. Twenty kinds of the same gearbox because nobody owned the standard.
My position, laid out in The Replaceable Factory: build the plant so that nothing is repaired in place. Every unit is designed to come out and be exchanged in hours, and the one that came out gets rebuilt, stripped or scrapped somewhere else. Weigh that against the payroll it replaces, not against the price of a part. The technology to do it already exists. What's missing is somebody drawing the plant that way.
If you're building something new and you want the maintenance architecture looked at before it's locked in, that's the work.
I’m Ryan McIntosh, a Red Seal Industrial Mechanic and Millwright with thirty years on the tools. That covers production and management, and twelve of those years in research and development, the job where you stop maintaining the machine and start deciding what the machine should be.
Food and beverage production, meat packing, pulp and paper, sawmills, OSB, plywood, oil field and mining. Shutdowns, turnarounds, breakdowns, installations, commissioning and design. Days, nights, camp and callout. Work across that many plants and you learn which problems belong to one mill and which ones are universal. Almost all of them are universal.
The difference between me and a consulting firm: I don’t sell you a program. I find what’s real and tell you straight.
Everything I look for in an audit is in print, plainly enough that a competent person could follow it.
The audit, chapter by chapter. Where plants lose money, how to count it, and why it never shows up on the page it should.
Why the future of industry is to design the work out. The plant where nothing is repaired in place, and the arithmetic that makes it inevitable.
The trade side: where the maintenance day actually goes, and why most maintenance should have been designed out on the drawing. At The Last Millwright →
A bearing fails the same way in Guadalajara as it does in Prince George. If you run an operation, or you’re building one, tell me about it.
Or call: 250-252-3371
Efficiency audits · Capital project design review