Floor to Forecast — the work you do, the program you run, the plan you fund, the budget you defend
Four questions. Most plants stop two links in.
The work you do
Does your reactive work feed real condition assessments back into your PM program?
The program you run
Does your PM program tell you what belongs in the capital plan for the next five years?
The plan you fund
Does that capital plan carry into the budget alongside PM, reactive work, operations and procurement — or does it sit in its own spreadsheet?
The budget you defend
And when something has to be cut, can you trace the number back to the work that drives it?
Most plants can answer the first. Some can answer the second. Almost none can answer all four — and everything past the break is opinion.
The gap
Your plant floor and your back office do not talk
The information already exists. It's on the floor, in the logs, in people's heads. It just never travels.
Each trade hands off a summary and the detail dies at the boundary. By the time a number reaches the budget, nobody can say what work is underneath it — so the budget gets defended on conviction instead of evidence.
Why this gets repaired rather than documented
One person who can call the condition of the equipment himself, and model what it means for the money.
Engineering firms do the first and stop at the PDF. Accountants do the second and have never been in the boiler room.
Power Engineer, 3rd Class
The condition call is mine, not a subcontractor's.
Electronics Engineering Technologist
Controls and instrumentation read and verified.
Electrical Engineering degree
Holds its end when the plan turns into procurement.
Three places the chain gets repaired
- 01Reactive work and PM program review
Every task tested against what has actually failed. $3,000 – $8,000 CAD.
- 02Capital plan
Ranked, costed, reasoning written down, a confidence level on every line.
- 03Finance connection
Budget and forecast tied to operational reporting, month by month.
Do the arithmetic yourself
I'm not going to tell you what your downtime costs
The published figures are weighted toward very large plants and don't survive contact with a 50-person operation. You already know your own number, or you know it within a few hundred dollars.
So the method is on the site instead. You supply every figure, the working is shown line by line, and the entry price sits beside the total so the comparison is one you make rather than one I assert.
Run it against your plantThree questions the page asks you
- —What does one hour of unplanned downtime cost you? What about a full stop?
- —How many hours did you lose last year that you can actually account for?
- —Against that: what does it cost to find out what could be improved?
Richard Howes — Power Engineer 3rd Class · Electronics Engineering Technologist · Electrical Engineering degree
Flintstone Technologies Inc., Creston, BC · You talk to me, and I'm the one who walks your plant — there is no junior consultant behind this.
The ask
A call about your plant, and whether this is worth doing
A call or an online meeting. We talk through your equipment, how the work gets recorded, and where your chain actually breaks — and at the end of it we both know whether there's a fit. It isn't a sales call and it isn't a quote.