If you are in an asset-intensive business, you know the importance of having a comprehensive approach to asset reliability, safety, and maintenance. Gaps in asset management and optimization can lead to unplanned downtime for reactive maintenance, missed commitments, lower profit margins, and a negative impact on your asset’s life and performance.
Read on to learn how asset reliability consultants can provide tremendous value to your business.
What is asset maintenance reliability?
You rely on your assets to meet your production goals, so maximizing asset availability directly connects with revenue generation and profitability. Asset Reliability focuses on optimizing the design, operation, maintenance, and sustainability of an asset to ensure that it performs to expected levels throughout its useful life with minimal downtime at the lowest financial and environmental costs. Properly defined asset reliability covers the entire lifecycle, from delivery to decommissioning or cradle to grave.
How do you determine the reliability of an asset?
There are many KPIs and factors that contribute to evaluating asset reliability. There are standard analytics that give you insights, as well as unique attributes depending on the asset classification to determine reliability. Many of today’s software tools support measuring technical indicators for asset reliability from performance data such as downtime, mean time to repair, and mean time to failure.
For example, a couple of common reliability metrics are:
Mean time to repair, or MTTR, measures a department’s ability to respond to a downed asset and restore it to optimal working conditions. This simple metric is a strong indicator of an organization’s overall reliability program and maintenance preparedness as it is impacted by several key aspects such as:
- Having the correct parts when a failure occurs
- Having the proper tools for maintenance activities
- Having available resources and personnel to respond quickly to asset failures
This simple calculation is determined by taking the total repair time over a set period and dividing that result by the equipment’s number of failures over that same period. MTTR is typically expressed in hours when determining asset optimization.
Another necessary measurement that asset reliability consultants consider is the mean time between failures, MTBF. This calculation divides the equipment’s operating time by the total number of failures experienced over the same period. MTBF is used quite frequently in asset maintenance and reliability work. This metric provides insight into the asset reliability and maintenance plan the asset.
Areas that impact this metric include:
- Design elements that contribute to premature failures
- The effectiveness of the preventive maintenance plan and schedule for the asset
- The quality of the parts utilized to maintain the asset
- The experience and knowledge of the personnel working on the asset to correctly perform maintenance
How do you measure asset reliability?
Once you have the MTTR and MTBF of any equipment, you can determine its availability, also known as the amount of uptime or running time. You’ll get availability by dividing the MTBF by its MTBF plus MTTR. Most business assets need to have an availability of at least 95 percent. Mission-critical assets typically demand a higher availability percentage. Economic indicators also provide insight into the asset cost and performance at its current stage in its lifecycle. All these factors can be combined into overall asset health, empowering decisions surrounding the assets’ reliability and overall lifecycle optimization.
How can you improve asset integrity?
Enhancing the reliability of your business assets is dependent on your asset strategies and maintenance programs. Optimized maintenance activities and utilization of available technology can keep equipment availability high to meet your production needs while managing costs.
Working with an asset integrity management specialist, you can quickly determine your current state, identify key opportunities, and optimize maintenance activities while planning for asset replacement needs relying on key metrics like asset availability. You can eliminate the guesswork in asset management when you partner with an experienced subject matter expert to develop and implement a strategic maintenance approach.
How can asset reliability consultants help?
Asset reliability consultants determine a particular asset’s criticality and reliability and optimize maintenance activities to allow you to better utilize resources when bandwidth is an issue. They have the knowledge and experience to evaluate your assets and develop a reliability and maintenance program tailored to your goals and KPIs.
The main goal of hiring an asset reliability consultant is to optimize the entire lifecycle of your critical assets. Partner with our expert consulting team to access our decades of experience across industries.
SEAM Group is a global asset operation management company that offers asset safety, reliability, and maintenance for businesses worldwide.
Call us at 866.772.6770 to discover how we can assist you with asset reliability to deliver mission-critical outcomes for your people and shareholders.