As its name suggests, an “asset” is a useful or valuable thing. Indeed, the antonym of “asset” is “liability”. Hence, an organization’s assets should deliver value; not cost money.
With the right techniques and strategies in place, asset managers can ensure that their plant and equipment is performing at and being maintained at optimum levels. These many and varied techniques can be applied across the different phases of an asset’s life to ensure that, instead of draining money from the bottom line, it actively contributes to margin increases.
Managed the right way, assets can contribute significantly to profit margins.
It takes a strategic approach to maintenance and asset management, in key areas such as:
- Increasing availability and plant capacity
- Reducing unnecessary maintenance costs
- Reducing unnecessary spares holding costs
- Planning optimum retirement of plant and equipment
Once you determine a key focus area, it’s important to apply the right technique.
System Analysis
The primary objective of System Analysis is to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in a system, and is particularly useful in complex operations where the contribution of different parts of the system are not clear. An analyst performing System Analysis builds a representative model using reliability block diagrams, and runs a simulation to produce a quantitative view of the contribution of all parts of a system. The technique is used to assess the reliability of individual components and their dependencies on other events or assets in order to assess the overall availability of the system. This helps to determine the importance of each element, so that the analyst can play “what if” with different levels of redundancy, size of buffers, maintenance strategies, and spares holding levels, in order to find the optimum.
Maintenance Benefit Analysis
Unfortunately, there has been a long tradition of organizations fostering a culture of maintenance in which the maintenance crews are lauded as heroes when they step in to fix things that are broken. In such cultures, preventative maintenance is less appreciated, despite it being proven to save money. Maintenance Benefit Analysis – similar to Maintenance Optimization– is used to evaluate a maintenance plan and identify any areas where maintenance is either not needed or is not optimal. A Maintenance Benefit Analysis is used to identify where alternatives to current practice can be improved by choosing a different type of strategy or frequency.
Spares Optimization
Typically, maintenance crews love spares and want lots of them in their plant or facility. Yet plant managers resent having too many spares in stock as they tie up capital and take up storage space. Spares Optimization is all about finding the optimum level of spares to hold; a level that balances the cost of not having spares available against the cost of holding the spares in stock.
Repair vs Replace Analysis
Knowing when to replace a piece of equipment shouldn’t be guesswork, as the right time to replace can save hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs. Repair vs Replace Analysis is used to predict or track the costs of repairs against the cost of replacement. As the cost of repairs increases (which incorporates costs like labor and parts), it becomes less viable to maintain the asset. Plus, as the cost of new equipment falls, it becomes more viable to buy it new. Life Cycle Cost analysis can be applied to assess the optimum point to switch from repair-mode to replace-mode.
