Most plants choose a maintenance contractor on rate per man-day. A year later the machines are still breaking down, the contractor blames the spares, and nobody can say whether anything improved.
The problem is not the rate. It is what the contract measures.
1. What exactly is being bought?
There is a difference between supplying technicians and taking responsibility for machine availability. Both are legitimate. They are not the same purchase.
If the contract pays for hours worked, you have bought manpower. If it pays against uptime, MTTR and rejection rate, you have bought maintenance. Decide which one you need before you go to the market, because the two cannot be compared on price.
2. Who actually turns up?
Ask for the trade mix, not the headcount. Twelve helpers and one fitter is not the same team as six fitters and two electricians, even if the invoice looks similar.
Ask what qualification each person holds. ITI, diploma or BE. Ask who supervises them on your shop floor, and whether that supervisor is on site or visiting.
3. Who carries the statutory liability?
In India this is the question that costs money when it goes wrong. PF, ESI, contract labour registration, safety compliance. If the contractor handles all of it in writing, you have transferred the risk. If the contract is vague, you have not.
4. What happens at 2am?
Breakdowns do not wait for the day shift. Ask what the response commitment is outside working hours, who is on call, and what it costs.
Then ask for an example of a breakdown they attended last month and what the root cause turned out to be. A contractor who records root causes will have an answer ready. One who only replaces parts will not.
5. Is there a maintenance plan, or only a maintenance team?
A good contractor arrives with a schedule built around your production plan, not against it. Preventive work at changeover, not during a running shift.
Ask to see how work is logged against each machine. If the history lives in a supervisor’s head, it leaves when he does.
6. What gets reported, and how often?
Monthly reporting against agreed numbers is the minimum. Uptime, MTTR, MTBF, rejection rate, spares consumed.
If a contractor cannot tell you what they will report before the contract starts, they will not report it afterwards.
7. Can they do the work the audit finds?
Most plants have efficiency problems that maintenance alone will not fix — a bottleneck, a manual operation that should be automated, a machine past its best.
A contractor who can audit, then implement, saves you running a second procurement for every finding. One who only audits hands you a report and a problem.
Three warning signs
A quote that is substantially below the others. Someone has either misread the scope or is planning to under-resource it.
No named KPIs in the draft contract. If performance is not defined, it cannot be disputed.
No questions about your plant. A contractor who quotes without walking the floor is quoting a template.
What to do next
Write down what you want measured before you talk to anyone. Uptime target, acceptable MTTR, rejection rate. Then ask each contractor how they would hit those numbers and what they would need from you.
The answers will separate the suppliers from the partners faster than any rate comparison.
SGK India Engineering has run plant maintenance for Indian manufacturers since 2006, across automotive, steel, aluminium, power and heavy engineering. Every contract is measured against agreed KPIs.
Plant equipment maintenance services · Plant audit and automation
