How much EXTRA equipment are you running to compensate for operating hours you lose every day, week and year?

If you could reduce lost hours by 50%, how much extra product could you move with your current fleet?

If you do not know the answers to these questions, then you are probably wasting cash on bigger or more equipment when you could be tapping into the hidden capacity that you have already paid for.

Optimum Operating Hours reflect perfect world performance...
…but are never reported or focused on as a benchmark for maintenance and operations. If anything can create a common goal for optimizing your current infrastructure, it is a focus on optimum operating hours, which reveals optimum availability and utilization and enables the calculation of optimum production.

Actual Operating Hours are the net result of all equipment delays…
Maintenance and operations report availability and utilization every month and year, and are constantly measured by these stats. Management emphasizes maximizing these numbers, sometimes to the detriment of planned maintenance and planned operating delays.

Most of the focus each month is on equipment reliability and breakdowns. Questions at the morning meeting involve discussions about breakdowns and what was done to fix them. If planned delays are not regarded as “sacred” (i.e., not optional), then planned delays are the first things eliminated as the result of breakdowns or constrained throughput. To emphasize the importance of following the plan, the morning meeting should be equally focused on tracking whether the plan was followed.

The gap between Optimum and Actual represents TIME-RELATED LOST CAPACITY that you can tap into if you focus on it.
The difference between optimum and actual delays = breakdowns and a variance in planned downtime. Breakdown or unplanned maintenance = surprises. These are the hours that RCM goes after. But what about planned delays for maintenance and operations? By knowing the total hours in the plan and comparing them to the actual planned hours down, a new opportunity for improvement is revealed. Many times this opportunity for improvement does not require any investment.

I call this: Proactive Delay Management.

THERE IS A LOT TO GAIN!
This methodology can be applied to any mobile or fixed plant equipment to gain availability and utilization for virtually no cost.