Strategy squared

With most if not all equipment, one certainty holds true, parts wear out, fatigue and age takes their toll and equipment breaks down. The associated through life costs can account for a significant percentage (upto and sometimes in excess of 40%.) of total acquisition cost. This understandably guarantees a degree of management focus.

Ensuring that equipment runs effectively and safely when required is therefore of critical importance. While the business impact is characterized by a degradation in service levels, time traps and increased maintenance costs the worst case scenario, as is typified by the aerospace sector, can see a failure resulting in casualty or death of the operator. Effective Reliability and maintainability programs are put in place to deliver improvements in all these areas and more, reducing support costs and forecasting equipment effectiveness and configuring equipment for long term reliability.

Reliability and maintainability (often abbreviated to R&M) are a pair of related activities (reliability analysis feeds into maintainability programs) and are a standard element of many organizations engineering departments. While maintainability centers around designing for minimal maintenance and associated costs reliability remains concerned with ensuring maximum equipment effectiveness.

As already highlighted the benefits of R&M are far reaching and can include both hard and soft results – the typical benefits associated with R&M programs include

• Improved asset performance
• Reduced risk of catastrophic incidents
• Removal of repetitive failure
• Lower maintenance costs
• Less downtime
• Increased competitiveness of the sales organization
• Improved customer satisfaction.

Perhaps the biggest benefit from R&M is the associated cost benefit. Equipment reliability has a significant impact on through life operational cost, system readiness, safety operational success and Logistics footprint. – research on the UK Ministry of Defence in 1990 showed that unreliability cost £1 Billion and that commitment to R&M could save around £500M.

Notably the aerospace industry has been behind advances in R&M and has seen significant benefits from it’s deployment – reducing aircraft crashes from 67 to 1 per million takeoffs and radically reducing equipment failure. R&M is now seen however in a multitude of industries – in 2006 – the Las Vegas Water district capitalized on a $300,000 reduction in life-cycle costs on pumping stations as a result of R&M initiatives.

Carry on to part two of our series on Reliability and Maintainability