Maintenance and Reliability: The Keys to Success
Maintenance and reliability are two areas of business that often go unnoticed, or underserved, yet few companies can be successful when they are neglected. At Maintenance Innovators, Inc. our mission is to ensure that our clients have the tools and techniques they need to keep their capital equipment operating at peak performance to facilitate a business that operates at a peak level. We achieve this by helping clients understand, analyze, innovate and adjust their existing maintenance processes and procedures in order to improve asset reliability.
It happens to businesses around the world, every day. It’s crunch time! You have a huge order to complete or a project to finish, and a critical piece of equipment fails. Your maintenance crew drops everything they are working on in order to help, only to find that the parts they need to fix it aren’t in your storeroom. Everything comes to a screeching halt! Your employees are stressed out trying to figure out how to get things back on track. Best case, overtime is extended, we run into the weekends, production is made come hell-or-high water. Worse case, the customer delivery is late.
The root of ‘maintenance’ is maintain. This could be incorrectly interpreted as “Keep it like it is.” In fact, what we’d want to do for equipment that is in poor condition is to optimize its condition, and then, maintain it at that higher level. Rather, it’s helpful to think of an asset arriving at our site with what we call ‘inherent’ reliability. Our job is to now ‘maintain’ that inherent reliability. We execute ‘maintenance’ to ‘maintain’ that optimum condition.
Reliability is an interesting concept when you really begin to understand that you can’t maintain more reliability into an asset than an asset has inherently. As previously stated, you work to ‘maintain’ that level. A good street definition for reliability is, “The asset does what it’s supposed to do, for as long as it’s supposed to do it, under stated conditions.” What we all miss in these ‘stated conditions’ are the details. For example: keep it clean, keep it cool, keep it dry, tight, aligned, properly loaded, properly lubricated, properly operated, etc. The devil as we know, is in the details.
In a manufacturing business, equipment breakdowns are a major cause of lost time and money. According to a recent study, major manufacturers lose about one TRILLION dollars a year due to equipment failures. The same report also stated that Fortune 500 global manufacturing companies “lose approximately 3.3 million hours a year to unplanned downtime.” That is simply staggering!
Maintenance Innovators, Inc., was founded in 2007, with the idea that maintenance and reliability are core value drivers to any business. Everything we have done since then, for clients all over the world, has built on this idea. We have continued to hone our methodology, becoming known as practitioners of high-performing maintenance and reliability as well as leaders and consultants in industry. Our foundational practices include preventive and predictive maintenance, planning and scheduling and storeroom control, among others. We have applied these principles for companies in all kinds of industries, all around the world.
If you would like to learn more about how improved maintenance and reliability can impact your business, contact Maintenance Innovators at (913) 633-4009 today. We are a veteran-owned business serving clients across the USA and around the world. Our team of experts will be happy to guide you on the path to better performance, less downtime and greater profits.