5 Key Questions to Optimizing Equipment Reliability Strategies
Unscheduled downtime can be quite costly – eating into productivity and profitability. The right maintenance strategies can help to improve equipment reliability.
Answering the following five questions can help determine whether you have a solid equipment reliability program – and how you can start to turn towards a more predictive equipment reliability strategy.
1. What is your maintenance cycle plan?
High equipment reliability is critical to your business, so you likely have some form of a maintenance cycle plan in place. This plan should serve as the basis to inform your ongoing maintenance tasks.
It should include:
- Allocation for key resources
- Detailed list of assets
- Types of maintenance performed
- Frequency of maintenance tasks
- Maintenance tasks schedules
This information can build a baseline of what’s being maintained and when – and identify areas to focus on as you optimize maintenance strategies.
2. How do you find out issues are occurring with your equipment?
An aging infrastructure challenges most industries. For those in equipment reliability, if not properly planned for, it can lead to more issues that require immediate attention.
Even so, not every issue that arises will require a maintenance action. It’s important to identify how the equipment reliability team finds out about equipment issues and prioritizes the rework.
- Regular inspections and checks: Identifying signs of wear, damage, or abnormal operations can occur with visual inspections completed during scheduled maintenance or equipment monitoring rounds.
- Condition monitoring: Continuous or periodic condition monitoring of equipment, such as equipment vibrations or sampling oil can help identify if there are any indications of equipment degradation.
- Data and reporting: If data and metrics are available, it can provide insight into whether there are trends and patterns that may be indicative of an issue.
Understanding how issues are identified can determine if more proactive measures should be taken to reduce the unplanned failures.
3. Are you continuously improving?
Continuous improvement is an ongoing process for those in equipment reliability, mostly because of its immense benefits. With a systematic approach to maintaining equipment and using feedback, it helps to eliminate waste, inefficiencies, and even defects in assets.
As you think about your initiatives, there are several areas to focus. Leveraging data and analytics – whether from your assets or the systems that support them – can provide insight into what’s happening, and inform key decisions. To make these decisions, leaders have been using techniques like Kaizen events and lean principles.
4. How are you monitoring the success of your maintenance strategies?
Advances in technology means that assets are triggering more data points on a more regular basis, which means there’s a great deal of data available to operations leaders. This can be useful – if you know how to use it.
Much of this data lives in disparate systems, which can be challenging to understand how it works together to tell a full story around the performance of the asset.
By leveraging a platform, like ENGAGE from Endevor, that can bring this information together, it can help to build a cohesive story of what’s happening, why it’s occurring, and what can be done about it.
With ENGAGE, you can integrate with your other systems of record, like sensors, preventive maintenance software, and other systems, to understand what’s happening at the asset level.
This single view can help inform key actions and what can be done to optimize equipment reliability.
With all this centralized data, it can better inform action plans to improve maintenance strategies and indicate areas of focus for plant reliability.
5. How do you maintain optimal reliability?
Building out a maintenance cycle plan, focusing on continuous improvement, and monitoring the effectiveness of maintenance strategies can help to significantly lower the costs associated with your maintenance strategies while maintaining equipment reliability.
How is this done? With a maintenance cycle plan, it can start to move maintenance tasks away from an unplanned reactive procedures response to equipment. Using condition-based monitoring supplemented with a predictive maintenance focus can help to optimize ongoing reliability efforts.
Continuous improvement focuses on finding ways to identify and eliminate waste while driving efficiency. Perhaps the most helpful part of this comes from looking at what’s currently being done, and informing how to optimize it in the future.
And, lastly, monitoring the effectiveness of maintenance strategies by bringing together all data points into a single view to see what’s happening. This can provide essential visibility into the “why” – and help inform what should be done to optimize future maintenance cycles.
Let’s Optimize Your Equipment Reliability. Schedule a demo with us to learn more about how our solutions eliminate work complexity and maximize productivity for your equipment.