Peter Martin is a vice president at Invensys Process Management, in Foxboro, Mass., where he leads a group that studies the financial role of asset management. The group has interviewed many manufacturing executives over the years and uncovered many interesting views.
Because the role of engineering is to support operations and maintenance, Martin says, most business managers interviewed who were responsible for industrial operations believe that the measurement of the performance of engineering should be the improvements realized in operations and maintenance. Engineers establish the potential, while operators and maintenance are tasked to achieve the potential. When asked to identify and define the most appropriate performance measures for operations and maintenance, business managers often state that operators should be primarily measured on the asset utilization of the plant assets under their control, while maintenance personnel should be measured by the asset availability of the resources in their domain of responsibility.
Unfortunately, the business value generated by such activities is not easily discernable. This may help to explain the drastic engineering headcount reductions of the last decade in industrial operations.
Asset utilization and asset availability are not measured directly in most manufacturing plants. But because the histories of plant operational data are available in a number of industrial operations, the general relationship between these two measures can be discerned through the use of statistical analysis tools, such as factor analysis and correlation, or other operational measures stored in the plant historical databases. Martin’s analysis of this data reveals that asset availability and asset utilization tend to be inverse functions as they approach their maximum ranges. “This is interesting,” says Martin, “because in most plants, operations and maintenance are essentially managed as independent functions, and asset availability and asset utilization are treated as independent variables. The inverse nature of their relationship implies that an increase in one will likely drive a decrease in the other.”
Concludes Martin, “This inverse relationship in industrial plants may occasionally put operators and maintenance personnel at odds with each other. The better the operations and maintenance teams perform, the more likely it is that they will experience conflict. With the evolution of sophisticated control and maintenance technologies implemented to help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of maintenance and operations, the probability is that both asset availability and asset utilization will get to their maximums, and the probability is higher that a schism between operations and maintenance may develop. These conflicting measures of operational and maintenance performance make analysis of plant level performance measurement systems, and perhaps even the reevaluation of plant floor workflows, more essential than ever in the quest for optimal plant performance.”
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