It is said that maintenance’s product is production hours, to this end the objective for any maintenance department must be to provide the equipment availability needed to meet production targets, at the optimum cost. Availability must therefore be a key measure for any manufacturer, however equipment with the same availability can have totally different reliability characteristics.
It can be shown that Availability is related to an asset’s Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF – a rough measure of reliability) and its Mean Time To Repair (MTTR – its Maintainability).
Organisations often measure MTBF and there are commercially available databases that give Failure rates for different equipment types. Engineering downtime (MTTR) is greatly influenced by effective maintenance management. The majority of organisations do not measure MTTR and are therefore missing out on reducing downtime.
To understand more about reliability take a look at our Managing Plant Reliability & RCM course