Asset Performance is a hot topic in industrial automation right now. With so much capital invested in plant assets it’s understandable you want to maximize return. And thanks to the IIoT solutions now available there is so much more you can do to manage this.
For example, a fully integrated and comprehensive Enterprise Asset Performance Management solution can boost return on your capital, improving OpEx management and profitability. If you do invest in this type of technology, my top tip is to make Asset Reliability your first priority.
Let me illustrate what I mean by this with some scenarios from everyday life:
- Your home entertainment system is set up with everything you could ever want – surround sound, a big screen smart TV, and premium streaming service, all connected and synced. But on movie night it always takes half an hour to get it to play.
- It’s early morning. You rush out of the already late for that important meeting, only to find the car won’t start (again). Someone left the lights on last night…
Is there anything more frustrating?
In a plant, Asset Reliability is about helping to ensure this doesn’t happen. It may sound obvious, but like in our day-to-day lives, what’s the point in investing in all the latest gadgets if they never work you need them?
Similarly, in industry your plant assets are expected to be available for production whenever you need them.
How Asset Reliability can affect your financial performance
Asset Reliability also has a direct impact on your financial performance. Unplanned downtime and maintenance are big cost factors in asset reliability. On average, up to 5% of production is lost every year to unscheduled downtime. At $10K per hour for a plant running 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year downtime costs $1 million annually, and that’s a conservative estimate. Most shareholders will not be happy with that figure – especially considering the amount of capital invested in assets. With the right insights generated from your system, you can prevent up to 80% of unplanned down time (Woll, et. al., 2002).
How to ensure your assets are always available when you need them
EcoStruxure Plant helps you turn the operating data which is probably already in your system anyway into business insights to help you:
- Reduce unplanned downtime
- Reduce OpEx
- Control maintenance costs
- Increase production output
Ultimately these gains translate into higher profits both in the short term and the long term. Because.
Give your maintenance staff the insights they need to reduce downtime
Advanced maintenance strategies can play a big role in Asset Reliability by minimizing downtime and overall maintenance costs. When unavoidable failures do occur, enhanced diagnostics can help plant staff identify the root cause and implement the right action as soon as possible. A clear, easy to understand display and alarm system can allow maintenance staff to understand what’s wrong and fix it as soon as possible, even with complex modern production assets and systems.
Giving the right staff the right insights, when and where they need them, makes good financial sense.
So if Asset Performance is an area you’re concerned about, we recommend focusing on Asset Reliability first. Because without this, it’s impossible to achieve the levels of profitability your shareholders demand.
Besides, no one wants to be the one who forgot to turn off the lights and cost the company thousands in production loss…
My next post will be on Maintenance Excellence and how to ensure every dollar spent maintaining your assets makes the biggest difference.
