The Role of Design-Phase Decisions in Creating Plant Maintenance Problems
Are you currently in the early design stages of a new plant?
Does your maintenance team have a seat at the table in those design meetings?
If the answer is no, you might like to know that you are, at this very moment, planting the seed of a weed in your system. A weed that may remain invisible in the early days, yet gradually takes root, grows, and feeds off your plant’s profit until the very last day of its operation—without ever being meant to create any real value.
In the design phase, the focus is usually all about production capacity, technology selection, reducing capital expenditure, and on-time project delivery. The charts are precise, the equipment is carefully selected, and the layouts are reviewed over and over again. Yet amid all this attention to detail, one simple question often goes unasked:
“What role does the person who will have to service this equipment for years, repair it, and wrestle with its failures, actually play in this design?”
At first glance, inviting the maintenance team to design meetings may seem premature. When not a single piece of equipment has been installed yet, talking about repairing them feels a bit like predicting the failure of something that hasn’t even been switched on. But the reality of industry tells a different story.
Many of the maintenance headaches that plague a plant years later are not born during operation—they originate quietly in these calm, seemingly harmless days of design. It is here, on the drawings, that small decisions eventually evolve into major shop floor problems.
Let’s not fool ourselves. In industrial projects, the focus of design meetings almost always revolves around a predictable set of topics—topics that are undeniably important, yet typically viewed through a single lens: the perspective of project engineering and capital cost control.
I have been in those very meetings—meetings where hours are spent debating the standards for drawing documentation. Discussions revolve around which standard has been used to calculate pipe diameters, which guideline determined the cable sizing, and how shifting a pipeline route by just a few meters might affect the cost figures reported to the investor.
These are the same meetings where people meticulously discuss the number of cable tray supports or pipe racks, where equipment layout, piping routes, and spatial optimization are examined in detail. Everything appears engineered, rational, and entirely defensible.
And, of course, there are those moments of pride—when you confidently explain that a standby pump has been included at a certain point so that if the primary pump trips, the production line will not come to a halt. With a tone suggesting you have anticipated the future, you defend that design decision.
But let me ask a simple question.
Amid all this precision and calculation, how many times have you actually asked a maintenance expert for their opinion about that very pump?
How often have you asked whether the discharge piping has been designed in such a way that, if one day the pump needs to be dismantled, it can, in practice, be dismantled at all?
Perhaps it is worth stepping away from the design room atmosphere for a moment and taking a look at industrial reality. In the language of reliability and maintenance engineering, one point has been emphasized for years: a large share of a system’s future costs and problems does not arise during operation, but is shaped right there, in those early design stages.
Various studies in reliability engineering indicate that between 60 and 80 percent of the life cycle cost of industrial equipment is influenced by decisions made during the design phase. Put simply, long before the first piece of equipment is installed or the first product leaves the production line, the fate of a large portion of future maintenance and repair costs has already been determined.
The reason is not particularly complicated. Many of the factors that later evolve into recurring failures, prolonged repair times, or high maintenance expenditures originate in design decisions: poor equipment accessibility, layouts that compromise safe service operations, piping configurations that turn the removal of a simple piece of equipment into a multi hour intervention, or the selection of equipment that ultimately faces serious constraints under real operating conditions.
In such situations, the maintenance team usually enters the scene only after everything has already been built—when correcting many of those design decisions is either extremely costly or practically impossible. The result is that small design flaws turn into permanent operational issues; problems that may seem minor each time they occur, yet over the years become a continuous source of wasted time, energy, and money for the plant.
At this point, a reasonable question may arise: if many of these issues become apparent after the plant is commissioned, why aren’t they simply corrected later on? The short answer is that fixing them is often extremely difficult, prohibitively expensive, or sometimes even impossible.
During the design phase, changes exist only on paper. Relocating a pump, rerouting a pipeline, or adjusting the installation position of a piece of equipment may require nothing more than a few hours of drawing revisions. Yet those same changes take on a completely different meaning once the plant has been constructed and commissioned.
At that point, the equipment has already been installed, pipelines have been welded, cabling has been completed, and the unit is in operation. Any modification may now require production shutdowns, dismantling equipment, cutting pipelines, altering structural elements, and incurring considerable costs.
For this reason, many design deficiencies are never fully corrected. Instead, organizations gradually learn to live with them. Equipment with poor accessibility is repaired by simply spending more time on the job. Components that are difficult to replace are serviced through more complex procedures. For equipment that fails repeatedly, larger inventories of spare parts are kept in stock. In other words, rather than addressing the problem at its root, organizations develop a series of temporary fixes and operational workarounds.
On the surface, these adaptations may appear to keep the problem under control. In reality, however, they impose a hidden cost on the organization: increased equipment downtime, a heavier workload for the maintenance team, higher consumption of spare parts, and reduced system reliability.
The ultimate consequence is that a seemingly minor design decision can cast a long shadow over a plant’s performance and cost structure for years to come.
To better understand this issue, it is useful to look at a real experience from an industrial environment. Years ago, in one plant’s water treatment unit, the water transfer channels had been designed in such a way that they ran directly in front of the multi port valves of the resin water softeners. During the design stage, this layout probably did not appear to be a significant concern. Over time, however, the problem gradually revealed itself.
The covers of these channels, constantly exposed to water, had gradually suffered corrosion and deterioration. As a result, safe and convenient access to the multi port valves of the softeners became increasingly difficult. The consequence was predictable: over time, operations and maintenance personnel became less inclined to carry out the resin regeneration process—a task that was essential but had become physically demanding and unpleasant under those conditions.
The consequences did not take long to surface. The quality of the feedwater to the steam boilers gradually deteriorated and water hardness increased. Eventually, this led to serious damage in the boiler tubes, to the point where tube replacement became unavoidable.
But the story did not end there. When the maintenance work was being planned, it became clear that the two steam boilers had originally been installed directly facing each other during the plant’s construction—leaving virtually no space for performing the tube replacement work. In simple terms, the necessary access for a major maintenance intervention had never been considered.
In the end, the only practical solution was to demolish part of the building structure and use cranes to reposition the boilers so that the repair work could be carried out. The financial cost, production downtime, and operational complexity of this intervention were far greater than what would ever have arisen had a little more attention been paid to accessibility and maintainability during the original design phase.
Design mistakes rarely reveal themselves as a single dramatic, catastrophic failure. Instead, they resemble small but persistent leaks in a plant’s cost structure—minor losses that, taken individually, may seem insignificant but accumulate steadily over the years. Each one drains resources quietly, yet collectively they can grow into a substantial financial burden.
One of the earliest consequences is repetitive equipment failures. When assets are installed under conditions that lack proper access, adequate ventilation, or stable operating parameters, their failure rate rises significantly. Studies in the field of industrial maintenance show that in many process industries, maintenance can account for 15 to 40 percent of operating expenses (OPEX); a portion of these costs stems directly from poor design decisions.
Another consequence is the increased consumption of spare parts. Equipment that is constantly subjected to operational stress or cannot be properly serviced due to poor accessibility will demand more consumable components. Beyond the direct cost of purchasing these parts, this also drives up warehouse inventory levels and ties up working capital in spare parts stock.
In addition to these issues, unplanned production stoppages are often the most expensive consequence of such design shortcomings. In process industries, even short interruptions can generate significant costs. Some industrial studies show that unplanned failures can affect 5 to 20 percent of annual production capacity.
Moreover, when repairing a piece of equipment becomes complex and time consuming due to poor design, the working hours of the maintenance team increase, and a considerable portion of the organization’s technical capability is spent on resolving recurring problems. The final outcome of this cycle goes far beyond direct expenses: it erodes system reliability and gradually diminishes overall plant productivity—an impact whose root cause is often found not in the control room, but in the design offices.
When practical industrial experience is considered alongside the findings of reliability engineering, one reality becomes clear: many of the problems we struggle with for years during the operational phase are, in fact, the result of decisions made during the design stage. Equipment without adequate access, layouts that complicate servicing operations, or selections that fail to account for real operating conditions are all signs of a critical perspective missing from the design process—the perspective of maintainability.
In engineering literature, this approach is known as Design for Maintainability—the practice of designing systems in a way that inspections, servicing, repairs, and component replacements can be carried out throughout the equipment’s life cycle with minimal time, cost, and risk. Achieving this goal is not a matter of adding a few maintenance instructions after construction is complete; rather, it requires that maintenance considerations be integrated into the decision making process from the earliest stages of engineering.
One of the key tools for achieving this objective is the Maintainability Review during the design stages—a structured process in which equipment layout, access routes, required maintenance clearances, the feasibility of handling and replacing heavy components, and periodic service requirements are thoroughly evaluated.
At this stage, the presence of maintenance professionals alongside design and engineering teams is essential. They bring practical experience with failures and real operational constraints to the design table—insights that cannot be fully captured through drawings and calculations alone.
Ignoring this dimension may appear to reduce project capital expenditure (CAPEX) in the short term, but in the long run it often leads to higher operating costs (OPEX), reduced equipment reliability, and more complex repair activities. Hence, one of the most important lessons from industrial practice can be summarized as follows: if maintenance is not given a voice in the early days of design, it will inevitably make itself heard in the years of operation—at a far higher cost.
Mobley, R. K.
Maintenance Engineering Handbook
McGraw Hill, 8th Edition, 2014.
Blanchard, B. S., & Fabrycky, W. J.
Systems Engineering and Analysis
Prentice Hall.
ISO 55000 – Asset Management Standard