Many times, we are asked to visit organizations with a view to identifying where the biggest challenges to a successful maintenance and reliability lie. Quite often we are shown where the problems lie but there is no real understanding of ‘why’ they exist. There is one situation that arises in pretty much every organization in some form or other and that’s a disconnect between maintenance and the procurement or storeroom functions. There are many variations on who does what in this function and even who owns what, far too many for me to go into every scenario, so for the sake of this blog I’m going to treat them as three separate functions and you can fit them to your situation.