Process safety and Maintenance spends

Penny wise pound foolish. If you do not maintain your assets well, you will end up paying more in the long run. Maintaining your assets not only improves process safety, it improves reliability and morale of the plant and maintenance personnel.In these days of cost cutting and lack of competency in companies, many plant managers turn a blind eye to the deteriorating assets. This also brings me to another question - how much can you flog your equipment? By debottlenecking efforts, you may increase your capacity by 30% but have you studied the effect of running on high load on the remaining plant equipment?
Read an article by  Jim McCarty on "spend now, save later" in this link. It applies to chemical plants also.