Partnering with your company to aggressively pursue reliability excellence will pay off all the way around. This maintenance expert shows you how it can be done.

Equipment reliability is a cornerstone of production stability and a primary driver of maintenance costs. "Reliability excellence" is the sustainable ability to manufacture products safely while meeting specifications and optimizing performance. Companies that successfully pursue reliability excellence can achieve remarkable improvements in their manufacturing performance. In maintenance alone, top performers’ costs are 10% to 15% lower than those of average performers – and 25% to 30% less than those of fourth-quartile performers. But, that’s just the tip of the value-creation iceberg. Even more importantly, highly reliable companies make better employers, better business partners and better community citizens.

Most companies in continuous process industries, however, do not recognize how crucial reliability is in gaining a competitive edge.Even when they do, few are able to capture its potential.The ones that do employ a holistic operating system that strengthens technical abilities, deploys disciplined management performance practices and establishes the right mindsets and behaviors from the executive suite through to the shop floor (Fig. 1). In addition, they aggressively pursue all three elements in an integrated way. These companies maximize equipment availability and optimize production levels. Their operating costs drop significantly because equipment failures

are less frequent and worker productivity rises. Product quality improves because stabilized production operations eliminate the variations caused by frequent shutdowns and restarts. Increased stability also minimizes environmental problems such as air emissions and wastewater discharges. Plant safety performance also rises due to enhanced maintenance planning, coordination and execution that reduce unsafe, reactionary practices.

Furthermore, as these companies reach world-class reliability, their freedom in operating their facilities soars. This flexibility allows them to seize marketplace opportunities, increase revenues and further enhance their reputations. For example, a well-regarded and profitable European-based materials company uncovered hidden capacity across its network of facilities that equaled the production capacity of an entire plant. A global petrochemical producer optimized profitability by shipping its product to customers from its most cost-effective site.Not only that, its network’s reliability allowed this company to benefit from its competitor’s inflexibility. By providing products to the competitor’s customers when they needed them, the company enhanced its industry reputation as a preferred supplier.

Why we hear so few success stories
Some organizations never get beyond "fix it when it breaks"for their maintenance strategy. As a result, they become excellent firefighters–but they never develop the ability to eliminate defects based on root causes. One case in point: while a major North American pulp & paper manufacturer is adept at minimizing the length of unplanned downtime, it has never tried to reduce the frequent outages that drive that downtime. As a result, its maintenance costs remain substantially higher than best-in-class.

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