Introduction and challenges
It is recognised that increasing production asset availability within existing processes will increase productivity and improve financial performance. Research shows that if manufacturing organisations were able to mirror industry best performers, industrial EBITDA could increase by up to 30%.
Over the next 10 years almost half of all technical assets in industry will reach end of life. Many companies plan to continue using their existing assets by means of lifetime extension programmes. However, over this same period, a significant group of experienced technicians and operators will also be due for retirement, and valuable knowledge, insight and experience will be lost. This outlook calls for major changes in asset management and maintenance practices.
Increased market volatility, shorter delivery lead times and shrinking inventory levels means a higher level of reliability is required for asset availability. Without such reliability, the organisation becomes distressed, priorities shift, and firefighting becomes the default mindset. Equally, consistent asset availability enables a predictable manufacturing output, which in turn results in improved delivery performance to customers.
How we can help
Stable Maintenance sets new end-to-end metrics that uncover improvement opportunities across maintenance and production activities. It is a data-driven approach to objectively confirming true performance levels. Stable Maintenance is a maintenance operating system with a focus on understanding and eliminating variation in the uptime availability of assets, building from same philosophy as Argon & Co’s Stable Ops™ approach.
Traditional maintenance activities typically focus on the effects of variation and finding fixes for that. Stable Maintenance focuses on eliminating the causes of variation and driving reliability, consistency and predictability of asset availability. Stable Maintenance also positively changes the workplace culture for employees involved in maintenance activities, impacting maintenance strategy, execution and continuous improvement.
This results in a more productive plant with significantly improved asset availability – examples of our clients’ benefits include:
- Increase of asset availability and positive EBITDA effect up to 30%
- Better delivery performance and enabling of shorter lead-times
- Diminished firefighting and cross functional continuous improvement between maintenance and production
- Neutralised threats of asset end-of-lifetime and technical workforce retirement
- Platform with data driven decision-making to move towards Industry 4.0
Stable Maintenance has been proven to improve ROCE (return on capital employed).