For decades, industrial leaders have clung to a long-standing belief: “If we plan and schedule better, wrench time will naturally improve.”

“Billions of dollars have flowed into complex planning tools, meticulous planning meetings, and detailed labor forecasting,” says Sundeep Ravande, CEO and Co-Founder of Innovapptive. “Yet maintenance wrench time — the actual productive time technicians spend performing hands-on tasks — remains stubbornly low, typically around 25–30%.”

The result? Growing backlogs, tighter budgets, and rising technician frustration.

One-Third of Maintenance Budgets Are Wasted

Industry expert R. Keith Mobley estimates that nearly one-third of every dollar spent on maintenance is wasted on unnecessary or improperly executed tasks. With over $200 billion spent annually on industrial maintenance, that’s a staggering $66 billion problem.

Maintenance labor alone accounts for roughly 42% of total maintenance costs, according to Dr. Alan Wilson. “Optimizing labor should be one of the most impactful areas to target,” Ravande notes. “But most organizations don’t measure or manage the real-world factors driving labor inefficiency.”

Instead, many still focus on planning and scheduling as the sole path to improvement, a strategy Ravande calls “deeply flawed.”

The Real Root Cause: Visibility and Collaboration Gaps

Applying first-principles thinking reveals that low wrench time isn’t primarily a scheduling or planning problem. “It’s a visibility, transparency, and real-time collaboration problem between maintenance, operations, storerooms, and safety teams,” Ravande explains.

Real-world causes of lost wrench time include:

  • Waiting on Spare Parts – Storerooms lack visibility into priorities, leaving technicians idle.
  • Waiting on Instructions – Communication breakdowns delay task starts.
  • Permit & Isolation Delays – Safety and operations teams fail to coordinate in real time.
  • Excessive Travel & Idle Time – Poor workload visibility leads to wasted trips.
  • Frequent Interruptions – Disconnected departments cause repeated start-stop cycles.

“All of these bottlenecks have the same root cause — poor visibility and weak collaboration,” Ravande says. “Planning and scheduling tools alone can’t fix that.”

Why Traditional Planning and Scheduling Often Fail

In many organizations, planners work around inefficiencies instead of eliminating them. Without real-time visibility into delays, schedules are built on estimates rather than measured data.

“You end up with unrealistic schedules that ignore reality,” Ravande says. “It’s guesswork, not operational planning.”

Case Study: A $20B Global Chemical Company

One $20 billion chemical manufacturer decided to challenge this thinking. At a major site, leadership:

  • Prioritized real-time visibility across departments.
  • Integrated communication between maintenance, storerooms, safety, and operations.
  • Captured actual downtime and delay data to refine schedules.

The results were dramatic: $8–$12 million in annual maintenance savings, achieved not by “better” planning, but by fixing visibility and collaboration first.

The Call to Industry Leaders

“If your organization still prioritizes planning and scheduling before addressing visibility and collaboration barriers, you’re getting the sequence wrong,” Ravande says. “You can’t plan your way around the roadblocks that stop work from getting done efficiently.”

He urges leaders to tackle root causes first — eliminate friction points, then use planning and scheduling as meaningful tools built on reality, not assumptions.

In an industry where every percentage point of wrench time improvement can translate to millions in savings, leaders can’t afford to overlook the fundamentals.

Ravande and the team at Innovapptive work with asset-intensive companies worldwide to address these challenges, helping organizations rethink traditional maintenance approaches and deliver measurable operational gains.