BREAKING DOWN THE BASICS: A LESSON IN ASSET RELIABILITY

Before you go marching down to your reliability engineers and ask questions like, “What are the top 10 worst performing assets in our production line?”, it’s important to know the actual difference between an asset and reliability.

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These two terms are used often in our field, and many times we aren't even sure what we're talking about. You may feel like you know what these terms mean on their own, but do you truly know what they mean when pressed together?

This article is going to walk you through how these two very important elements of our daily lives as maintenance & reliability professionals come together to either benefit or damage your business. Further, we will discuss how to view these terms and form a strategy for success.

WHAT IS AN ASSET?

First things first: what do we mean when we say something is an “asset?” Take a look around you and identify things that are:

• Costly to acquire and to make operational

• Critical to the operation of the business.

• A focus of maintenance activities, whether corrective, preventive, or even predictive.

A key element to help define what an asset is to your business is identifying those pieces of equipment that are valuable and worth caring about. The initial acquisition cost of the item may be an obvious parameter but not always. Rather, inexpensive equipment can be critical to the operation yet perhaps costly to maintain.

As part of your overall asset management strategy, you need to define what is an asset to your business:

• Are the costs to maintain (corrective, preventive, calibration, inspections, etc.) significant percentages of the budget? Are these costs fixed, or are they variables that need to be managed?

• Is there a difference between how accounting, maintenance and operations look at what is an asset?

• Is the equipment public-facing? Is there risk that while the equipment is functioning just fine, the public can develop a “problem,” with it?

Does the equipment add risk to the business, and how is the increased risk managed/mitigated?