24
24
M A C H I N E R Y
A N D
E Q U I P M E N T
Machinery & Equipment MRO
February 2022
DIRECTING RESOURCES TO ENSURE EQUIPMENT UPTIME A manufacturing facility needs to have consistent and dependable operations in place to increase productivity and profits. Equipment downtime = The number of seconds a machine was unable to work/ final sum of seconds observed The outcome is then multiplied by 100 to deliver the cost of machine downtime. Equipment Uptime = 100 – equipment downtime Improving the amount of equipment uptime holds many advantages. These include: • Decreased use of resources; • More predictable operations; • Less unplanned downtime;
• Improved productivity; and, • A strong supply-chain. Some of the best ways to increase equipment uptime are:
1. Condition monitoring technology and predictive analytics.
A functional piece of equipment has many metrics one must track, such as temperature, current, speed, torque, shear and power. Back in the day, it was a big challenge to measure all these aspects, but in today’s technologically advanced world, it’s as easy as installing condition monitoring technology. Tech-
Photo: jumlongch / Adobe Stock
B
y measuring the level of machine reliability, different metrics are produced. These metrics can be used to establish how reliable and consistent an organization’s day-to-day operations are. Machine uptime is the time a machine was delivering output and performing its duties (depicted in percentage). If the ‘uptime’ metric is high, one may conclude that the reliability of a machine is also high. Uptime is the opposite of machine downtime. If machine downtime is calculated, establishing machine uptime is easy.
