I'm talking industrial machinery, like stuff in paper mills and manufacturing facilities where downtime is highly uneconomical. A lot of times that stuff gets

I'm talking industrial machinery, like stuff in paper mills and manufacturing facilities where downtime is highly uneconomical. A lot of times that stuff gets run long beyond its useful life because new machinery cannot be rationalized for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this comment. You can do it and still have an overall reliable operation. You just can't make assumptions about your equipment running perfectly all the time when you plan out the policies and procedures for the rest of your operation. Sure, you'll have people like the author, the person I'm replying to and you who will be complaining their butts off about clapped out equipment every step of the way but if your operation is designed to roll with the punches then at the end of the day you'll be 99% as capable as the people with new equipment who rely on that instead of being able to roll with it and fix things fast. Take your assumptions and gate-keeping and shove them somewhere unpleasant.