For some reason, asset management has become synonymous with equipment maintenance, but asset management is about getting the most out of things not just fixing them. An item of plant, a set of items or the entire factory depends on the availability of assets as well as their effective utilisation. Maintenance by itself, although contributing towards asset availability, cannot satisfy these requirements. To do this, both production operations and maintenance must be considered.
Imagine that you have just installed a new bottling line in your factory. How can you best look after this very expensive asset? The answer is rather obvious - don`t turn it on! If you do, it will only break down and cost you even more. It will, however, be instantly available at any time you choose (but not to do any kind of actual work). Should you be bold enough to turn it on and crank it up so that it is working at maximum capacity, you will be fully utilising your new asset only to have it break down thereby reducing its availability to do work (which will seriously affect those delivery promises you made earlier).
The real difficulty may be integrating the people rather than the software!
Michael lePlastrier, Director, EOH Consulting Services.
While the production team is paid to maximise utilisation, the maintenance team is cringing on the sidelines because they`re paid to provide maximum plant availability, which can only decrease with increased utilisation. While all this is going on, let`s not forget that these are the two teams that have the most impact on the efficient operation of industrial plants and their resulting economic value.
There`s got to be a better way than paying the police to catch criminals and paying the justice department to set them free. The answer lies in realising what the original objective of the exercise should have been - maximised asset value. In other words, maximising the contribution an asset can make even if this means lower effective availability and utilisation. Dynamic performance measurements (DPMs) measure the business value of base assets, asset sets or groups of asset sets as a real-time vector that represents the true value that they generate. Instead of optimising availability or utilisation, manufacturers can now optimise the business value of their assets.
The real-time business performance data provided by DPMs enables a much more effective approach to true asset management. Rather than merely managing the availability of some instrumentation, plant personnel can drive business performance from asset sets, up to and including the entire plant.
This approach involves taking an objective view of what`s on the line. At the lowest level, an entire pumping station cannot be criticised because of the persistent misbehaviour of one valve. At the highest level, any enmity between production and maintenance teams cannot be criticised if they`re both trying to do their jobs. That`s not the problem. Only when we view the problem holistically as a "business problem" can we hope to resolve it.
Today, the technology is available to measure anything at any speed, report on it, integrate any aspect with other information and do just about anything else. Technology is not the problem (and it hasn`t been for some time now). The real difficulty may be integrating the people rather than the software! Only if we try to resolve the overall business issue rather than the individual parts will we then be able to integrate our own minds to see the best solution.
We`ve all been subject to an exciting evolution insofar as industrial automation, manufacturing execution systems and enterprise resource planning is concerned. It`s all coming together very quickly - in fact, maybe far quicker than we can wrap our minds around. We`re confronted with a technological Genie that can grant us virtually anything we wish for. Will we wish for cooperation between production and maintenance? Since we gave them conflicting goals to start with, this may be a good point to re-program the software problem between our ears.
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