The Manufacturing Connection: Reliability and Asset Performance For Profit

25 March 2014

Gary Mintchell, Executive Director

The one point you will hear from me as I set the direction of Maintenance Technology & Asset Performance magazine is that everything we work on—whether through division management, plant management, reliability, engineering, maintenance or operations—adds to the economic value of our company. What we do has strategic value. Let’s act that way.

Surveying the information that has been provided in this space over the past decade or so, I notice a recent trend to include more than traditional maintenance product information by adding emphasis on reliability. This is a good thing.

Let’s consider the real challenge we have. It is not just fixing things. It is not even simply reliability, which can also be viewed as just fixing things. The real problem is optimum throughput of product over time. We call that asset performance.

There are many tools at our disposal to help us in our quest for optimum asset performance. Most now derive from digital and computational technologies. Certainly, today’s professionals must be thoroughly proficient with digital networking and all the diagnostics that are available. Controllers and field devices are now information servers.

Using all this information becomes crucial. The tools for digesting, analyzing and presenting it may seem to be the same you have used for years. These tools, however, have also changed over time so that if you are not using the latest versions, you could be missing out. Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)/Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM) applications have existed for years, but their powers have grown significantly. Better check yours.

MESA International is an association for companies and individuals who develop and use MES solutions. Its long-running “Metrics That Matter” surveys have consistently shown that these software tools can help improve performance. This year, LNR Research conducted and analyzed the survey in collaboration with MESA. A recent blog post, http://blog.lnsresearch.com/blog/bid/194495/How-Do-You-Compare-Annual-Manufacturing-Performance-Improvements, discusses preliminary results of the survey. Two of the results concern maintenance specifically: Average Annual Performance Improvement of Maintenance was 14.9%. Average Annual Performance Improvement of Compliance was 18.5%.

The top metrics for maintenance include: Percentage Planned vs. Emergency Maintenance Work Orders and Downtime in Proportion to Operating Time. According to MESA, survey results indicate that “leading companies, especially those in asset-intensive industries, have learned that by focusing on improving maintenance metrics they can prevent expensive downtime and keep operations running at peak efficiency and safety. Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software applications in combination with real-time condition monitoring information coming from MOM and Industrial Automation applications are enabling companies to operate in a more predictable fashion instead of a reactive/disruptive fashion.”

Top metrics in the compliance category include: Reportable Health and Safety Incidents; Reportable Environmental Incidents; and Number of Non-Compliance Events per Year. “It’s hard to argue that health, safety and environmental issues shouldn’t be at the top of everyone’s list for vigilance and ongoing improvement,” MESA concludes. “These types of improvements require ongoing cultural awareness, supported by constant visibility and actions to improve these critical business and social metrics.”

What would you like to see in Maintenance Technology & Asset Performance in print and online? Let me know what you would like to know. I welcome ideas and feedback. You can send an email, “DM” me on twitter @garymintchell, message me on LinkedIn, or check out the Maintenance Technology group on LinkedIn and send a note there. MT&AP

Gary Mintchell, gmintchell@atpnetwork.com, is Executive Director of Applied Technology Publications. He also writes at www.themanufacturingconnection.com.