| Mick Drew - August News |
|
Improving the Reliability of Assets for any organisation can have a large impact on the bottom line. Improvements can be made in reducing the cost of maintenance, avoiding outage costs, reducing downtime and improving operations. There are quite a few improvement methodologies and I am surprised to still see “rules of thumb” that are applied. But there is a definite trend across many large organisations to embed sound strategies based on quantifiable outcomes. For the last twelve years ARMS Reliability have been implementing reliability and availability simulation tools to companies that want to quantify their strategies against the impact on their asset management goals. I was pleased to hear this week that Avista Corp have quantified the value of their asset strategies against historical performance as worth $7mil annually. This not only quantifies the financial impact but is able to be measured in some key Performance indicators of frequency of outages and duration of customer outages. This year we have worked with an organisation that was very good at performing maintenance. By analysing their history, ARMS Reliability were able to identify ways to improve availability of a key system (potential bottleneck) by 20%, without requiring capital. These companies reap the benefit of knowing the impact on the bottom line, if they adopt strategies that they are already capable of executing. I am pleased to say that the software we use for many of our studies, Availability Workbench has come of age. It now works seamlessly with SAP to load plans, produce documents, read history, identify Pareto items, filter and sort work order history, create Weibull data sets, update plans, check what plans are actually in SAP and check any differences from approved plans, check Process Reliability Graphs (Refer Barringer Process Reliability). |
