Emerson Exchange 365

“Companies are worried about the unscheduled downtime they are experiencing, the excess maintenance cost, and in some cases, less than stellar safety records,” according to Robert S. DiStefano, reliability consultant at Emerson and founder and former CEO of Management Resources, Group, Inc.

On Tuesday at Emerson Global Users Exchange, DiStefano shared his expertise on how the reliability value chain provides a systematic approach to optimizing asset reliability in top-performing enterprises.

He opened the presentation by observing that in a global enterprise, ad hoc, decentralized, non-standard reliability practices substantially damage business performance in safety, availability, and profitability.

DiStefano also talked about the shortcomings of approaches that allow inconsistent practices at different plants and the need for understanding the reliability value chain and addressing imbalances and broken links between the needed elements to bring enterprises into the top-performing quartile.

 “While many facilities spend too much on maintenance and receive little for the return on investment, there are significant opportunities to improve profitability, availability, and safety,” he said. “In fact, a company with multiple plants can uncover even greater savings and significantly increase shareholder value.”

A Solomon Associates global study of reliability practices that measured maintenance costs indicates that a top-quartile site spends less than a third of what a poor-performing, fourth-quartile plant does on maintenance. According to the same study, fourth-quartile performers experience almost 15 percent more disruptive downtime than top performers.

Research also shows that a top-quartile performing organization uses a set of well-linked reliability elements. According to DiStefano, the reliability value chain integrates elements in four categories: data, information, knowledge, and action. It sets the path for transforming data into information, knowledge, and action.

“Ultimately,” noted DiStefano, “the ability to achieve top performance status depends on the robustness of each element and, perhaps more importantly, on the effective connectedness of all of the elements into a continuous improvement cycle.”

One example of how reliability consulting and technology helped a company meet its need for optimizing and connecting these elements is Ensco. “The second largest driller in the world has invested significantly in standardizing reliability practices across their fleet worldwide, and they achieved a 63 percent return on their investments,” DiStefano said. “But, more importantly, they’ve increased their mean time between failures and drastically reduced their rig downtime per day.”