
Schneider Electric White Paper 2
Asset Performance
The Evolution
of the
Maintenance
Function:
What’s in a
Name?
Industrial maintenance has advanced considerably over the last two decades. Twenty
years ago, the predominant maintenance strategy involved reactive maintenance—waiting
for a piece of equipment, sometimes referred to as a plant physical asset, to break,
and then fixing it as quickly as possible. Results improved as maintenance engineers
developed more sophisticated preventive strategies, analyzing equipment to determine
the normal time-to-failure and scheduling maintenance to prevent failures before
they occurred. More recently, complex predictive maintenance strategies have been
developed, which involve directly measuring equipment conditions, such as vibration or
casing temperature, to forecast the probability of failure and then scheduling maintenance
procedures to fix the problem before it happens. Today, most industrial operations utilize
all three strategies.
As methodologies became more advanced, industrial maintenance communities evolved
the name associated with the maintenance function. Traditional maintenance management
shifted to asset management then to asset performance management, with each new
name intended to indicate the increased sophistication.
Although this naming evolution might seem appropriate for indicating increasing levels
of complexity, the focus on asset performance management might be both too narrow
and too broad when analyzing how to make industrial assets perform better: too broad
because the performance of industrial assets involves more than just maintenance
strategies, and too narrow because optimal performance of industrial assets should
include both transactional management and real-time control aspects.
The primary objective of industrial companies is to safely maximize profit from production,
and this requires a two-tier model, encompassing both asset performance management
and asset control. When combined with real-time information gathering, reported in
appropriate units, this approach creates a balance between the need to maximize
reliability and efficiency goals with safety constraints.
The performance of industrial assets is a function of both asset maintenance and asset
operation. In most plants, maintaining the asset and operating the asset are performed by
completely different teams, with completely different—and often conflicting—performance
measurements. The maintenance team is typically measured on the reliability of the asset,
while the operations team is often measured on the production throughput, or efficiency,
of the asset. The problem is that reliability and efficiency tend to be inverse functions; that
is, improving reliability typically involves reducing production throughput, and improving
production throughput typically means reducing reliability.
No wonder maintenance and operations teams have difficulty cooperating. They are
measured in a manner that penalizes one or the other, or both, for cooperating. This
industrial conundrum (figure 1) must be solved if manufacturers truly want to maximize
asset performance across their industrial operations.
The primary objective of
industrial companies is to
safely maximize profit from
production
Efficiency vs
Reliability:
The Industrial
Conundrum