Many organisations have concerns over how mature their organisation is when it comes to maintenance. While this may reflect choices made around operational priorities, some are also held back by a lack of reliable data that would enable more strategic planning.
The 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report, produced by RS in partnership with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), paints a mixed picture when it comes to the maturity of organisations in managing facilities and assets. Almost three in 10 (29%) rate their maturity level as high – up from 15 per cent the year before – but 53 per cent believe it is only medium, and almost one in five (19%) admit to a low level of maturity.
This may simply be reflective of the fact that there is always more to do and that an effective maintenance strategy requires prioritising what really matters, contends Richard Jeffers, Solutions and Technical Director at RS.
“Everything in maintenance starts with understanding criticality because not every asset in your factory will be critical for performance,” he points out. “I was in an industrial alcohol factory recently, and they have dual and triple redundancy on many of their systems. That means if they lose a pump, it doesn’t really matter because they’ve got a standby.
“But their gas turbines provide power to the site and if they lose one of those, they’d have to start shutting the site down. Focusing their effort on the gas turbines, rather than the pumps, clearly makes sense. Even though the pumps might be as expensive, the impact of failure is less.”
According to the report, the main types of condition-monitoring techniques used across industries are vibration monitoring (48%), oil analysis (47%) and current monitoring (44%), with 38 per cent using thermography and 26 per cent using ultrasonics. Organisations that implement these techniques are mainly motivated by the desire to better understand asset health (58%), predict failure (55%) and increase asset uptime (36%).
Jamie Hughes, Plant Manager at life sciences business Ecolab, believes techniques such as ultrasonics and thermography should be a minimum requirement for a maintenance department. “They are tools that enable you to identify and fortify work that you should be doing as part of your day-to-day activity,” he says.
Data concerns
The quality of the data around which organisations are measured could be one reason why they feel their function isn’t as mature as possible: 57 per cent believe this data is reliable, 28 per cent feel neutral on the issue and 13 per cent say it’s unreliable. Leaders are less likely to have confidence in data than those in hands-on roles, with fewer than half (47%) believing information is reliable, compared with 62 per cent of those in operational positions.
“If you don’t have reliable data, you’re always going to be behind,” says William Matthews, Asset and Lifecycle Manager, food and beverage industry. “If you don’t know the real source of the problem, it’s very hard to address that or to make an improvement.
“You can go down a rabbit hole of bad fault-finding. You might change the electrics only to find out that it’s mechanical, or you might think there’s something wrong mechanically only to find that somebody’s decided to overload a machine with extra product because they’re trying to get more tonnes out. You can’t get it wrong with reliable data.”
However, many organisations are constrained by the tools at their disposal to effectively manage and record information. While 62 per cent make use of computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS), 59 per cent still rely on Excel spreadsheets and 37 per cent on paper records.
This can be down to a combination of cost and the culture of the function, believes Hughes. “When you get into the bigger systems and online monitoring, there are some investment costs,” he says. “But there’s a fear factor as well because they can highlight things that perhaps you’d expect the engineering department to know, but they don’t. That can prevent people from engaging with those technologies.”
The main key performance indicators (KPIs) recorded are maintenance backlogs (44%), total maintenance cost (39%) and budget adherence (41%) – although the latter is put forward by only 31 per cent of high-maturity organisations.
Diagnosing downtime
As well as more effective diagnosis, effective data can help to reduce the impact of unscheduled downtime. The KPI of mean time between failures (MTBF) is currently measured by 30 per cent of organisations, while mean time to repair (MTTR) is measured by 22 per cent. Jeffers highlights that you can usually identify world-class maintenance in companies that extend the former and reduce the latter.
“That means understanding your critical assets and the routine things you need to do to look after them, so the cleaning, inspection and lubrication,” he adds. “Then you need to understand the leading indicators of failure so that you can start to do condition monitoring to see when a failure is going to happen, rather than responding after it happens.”
When it comes to reducing MTTR, it’s a case of ensuring the availability of both skilled labour and the correct spare parts. “That’s where working with the right industrial distribution partner comes in, with the right procurement, inventory and technical support,” he says. “That can make sure that the right fast-moving spare parts are in your factory and the slower-moving spare parts are in your distribution partner’s supply chain.”
Downtime data can be particularly powerful when combined with financial information around its cost, says Matthews. “The food industry is very financially driven, so talking about the financial impact of downtime is very useful,” he explains.
“We can say what the cost of failure is and – if we invest that money – how we could minimise the cost of downtime, and the payback in terms of production. So, if we decrease our downtime by 50 per cent, we might make 50 per cent. We should see more tonnage being produced with good cost benefits. If it’s costing us £50,000, I can make the case that I could employ a technician for a year for that.”
For more insight and opinion on the 2024 Maintenance Engineering Report, click here.
