去年，艾默生（Emerson）购买了管理资源集团（MRG）时，这家可靠性咨询服务公司的创始人兼首席执行官鲍勃·迪斯坦诺（Bob Distefano）告诉史蒂夫·索南伯格（Steve Sonnenberg），艾默生不是一家可靠性公司。但是，艾默生过程管理总裁Sonnenberg坚持认为，今天，艾默生绝对是可靠性业务。
That’s not only because of its acquisition of MRG, which group vice president Jim Nyquist refers to as “reliability doctors,” but also because Emerson, like its customers, recognizes reliability as an important business strategy that must be a board-level initiative, to be embraced and supported.
When speaking to industry press at an event associated with this year’s Emerson Exchange in Orlando, Fla., Nyquist stressed reliability’s relation to safety, availability and profitability.
Transient situations like shutdowns and startups create additional risk for process facilities, which means that any unplanned downtime caused by reliability issues is going to have a significant impact on safety. Unplanned downtime also relates to availability, of course, with as much as 5 percent of production capacity lost each year to unplanned shutdowns, Nyquist said.
“这是我们可以解决的问题。这在我们的行业中不应该是一个问题，但这是。” Nyquist说。“我们越能解决这个问题……我们就越能开始解决5％的可用性问题。”
The availability to make product hits straight at the profitability issue, but profitability is also affected in terms of maintenance costs. On average, it costs 50 percent more to repair a failed asset than if the problem had been addressed before failure, according to the U.S. National Response Center.
Considering all the bottom-line benefits, Emerson isn’t the only company paying more attention to reliability these days. “In the last several years, there’s been a palpable difference in the awareness in the boardroom about the linkage between maintenance and the bottom line,” said DiStefano, now vice president and general manager of reliability consulting for Process Systems and Solutions at Emerson.
他说，高管们对资产管理更加关注。他们不满意他们获得越来越多的数据而没有提高决策能力，他们意识到计划具有可靠性的新资产具有价值。
“There’s a lot of money at stake,” DiStefano urged, noting that manufacturers can achieve better operating performance simultaneously with lower maintenance costs. “For every $100 spent on maintenance at top performers, poor performance spends 3.5 times that.”
因此，尽管表现最高四分位数的植物在维护上花费了1.4％的植物替代价值，但表现不佳的人的支出却是3.5倍。Distefano说，尽管表现最好的人获得了96.7％的机械可用性，但表现不佳的人低于14％。
MRG—and now Emerson—is in the business of helping customers get to that top quartile in reliability performance. Three customers spoke during the press conference about the efforts MRG helped them make and the results they achieved.
Revealing the Superman shirt under his suit, Kevin Shoemaker, senior vice president of operations at bio-based ingredients company Corbion, talked about the big changes that are needed to get real reliability results. “If we focus on small changes in what we do, we cause slight changes in what we get,” he said. “We have to have significant changes in how we see the world.”
鞋匠还谈到了从基于时间基于条件的维护的范式转变。他说：“当我们有时间做出反应，计划时间，表演时间时，我们想对曲线进行维护。”
And Corbion has gotten the results. Plant operational equipment effectiveness (OEE) rose from about 88 percent in 2007 to 97 percent in 2012. And maintenance costs this year are only three-quarters what they were in 2005.
自2012年以来,鞋匠和他的团队一直在工作状态ng to get from their 2 percent spend on plant maintenance to the 1.4 percent of top-quartile performers. With an integrated approach of a computerized maintenance management system, advanced analytics, condition-based monitoring, reliability strategy, and live asset health and KPIs, they’re now at 1.75 percent, Shoemaker said.
Polyone和Lucite新加坡的代表也有类似的故事要讲。“在运营中，当我们查看可靠性领域时，我们发现了很多勤奋和敬业的人，但也很难将这项艰苦的工作变成结果，”全球专业聚合物Polyone的制造总监Kevin Bodine说。
博丁强调了正在进行的计划的重要性。他说：“只要您有这样的推出程序，您就不能走开并期望它继续前进。”他指出，每种工厂都会继续分析失败以消除原因。“所有这些都着重于生产和维护之间的文化和协作变化。”
