Maintenance is not a sexy discipline, but like brushing your teeth, it will catch up with you if you neglect it for long enough. It’s a lesson Sasol learnt the hard way during a cost-cutting exercise known as Project Rand. All businesses were instructed to save 10 per cent of their cost, without specifying where the savings had to come from. The easy way out was to save money on maintenance, and in the case of the infamous Boiler 9 at Secunda, it took Sasol eight years to recover from one year of deferred maintenance. Multiply this experience across Eskom’s eighty units, and you have a
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