Uptime Rapid Value Assessment
Quickly get to the root of problems, identify quick wins, estimate the total value to your business.
We literally wrote the book on Maintenance Management! “Uptime“.
With over a quarter-century of experience and our team of subject matter experts, we can quickly find performance gaps, their causes, determine corrective actions, estimate what it is worth to your operations if they take action, and provide a roadmap of activities to achieve it.
There’s not much we haven’t seen, experienced, and fixed before.
The Uptime Rapid Value Assessment is the third stage in our Conscious Asset ModelTM
You know something is wrong. Past fixes have fallen short. So now what do you do?
Maintenance and Reliability problems are complex and seem to defy solution.
Your in-house specialists have tried but they are handicapped.
When you are close to any problem, perspective narrows. The longer it persists, the more it defies solution. You need an outside expert opinion. You also need a perspective that’s enhanced through experience in multiple industries and settings.
We bring that fresh perspective to the table.
Value Assessment
Maintenance and reliability (M&R) problems lie buried under layers of symptoms and evade solutions. Miss the root cause, then the symptoms return. Why? The problem wasn’t solved.
M&R problems arise in these areas, and in the interactions among them:
- Maintenance
- Operations
- Parts Stores
- Purchasing
- Human Capital
Our Rapid Value Assessment provides:
- Analysis of your pain points, potential causes, cost, and output opportunities.
- Process review with particular attention to interactions between processes.
- Assessment of “maturity” of your M&R function.
- Identification of major areas for improvement with identification of what needs to be done.
- A list of “quick wins” that can deliver value (either costs or output results) in the near term.
- Specific recommendations about parts and stores to the level of the parts.
- Specific recommendations about which PMs are actually causing you trouble and should be considered for deletion (reducing manpower demand).
- A roadmap for improvement with an estimate of costs.
Why do we call it “rapid”?
It takes us less time than others, by about half. How can we do it so quickly?
- We specialize in this and deep subject matter expertise spans nearly half a century.
- We leverage powerful AI enabled analytics of your data before we even show up on site, and target problem areas very precisely.
- We literally wrote the book on this, and they’ve only read it.
Advantages
Deep insight. Speed. Price. Less resistance to change.
We can even help you pay for it.
Book an appointment to speak about our Uptime Rapid Value Assessment.
Why use Uptime?
It works! The “Uptime Pyramid of Excellence” is the de-facto standard for how to manage maintenance and reliability. Other models are based on it. It comes from one of the first and best books on the topic: “Uptime -Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management“.
We wrote it. We use it. We’ve learned from it. We’ve shared as learned. It is now in its 3rd edition. We know what works and what doesn’t.
No one else has a more proven model, nor more experience with it.
Start quickly and with confidence.
You will know the scale of the opportunity you have, what it’s worth, and what it can cost. Payback is often quick too, so the sooner you can start the sooner you realize the benefits.
If you prefer, we can also help you to go it alone:
- You can learn more about “Uptime” in our online course.
- You can actually use our “Uptime Self-Assessment” tool, the same one we use on-site, to determine just how you rate when compared against world-leading practices and performance. You will need our Uptime course first so that questions are not misinterpreted.
- You can even use our “Business Case Estimator” tool. It is also the same as the one we use on-site. It’s easy to use, and we can help you interpret the results you get.
Book a coaching appointment to speak with our Subject Matter Experts about what we can do to help you achieve world-beating performance from your physical assets.
Reliability is what you want. Maintenance is what you do.
Having your assets ready to run when you need them is requires availability. Reliability delivers both availability and dependable, steady operation at desired output levels.
Reliability requires that you care for your assets – proactively, before deterioration and random events can take them down. When that happens you are forced to react – fix after they break.
An effective maintenance program is proactive.
Efficient maintenance execution requires the right processes and practices so you get maximum “wrench time” (productivity) from your maintenance workforce.
Where you stand against the “Uptime” world-class standard.
“Uptime” is a framework for excellence comprising 10 inter-dependent components that work together. Being excellent in one area alone isn’t enough. You want to achieve competence in all components.
Our assessment, by subject matter experts, evaluates how you compare with successful practices that reflect over a quarter of a century of experience at hundreds of operational sites. We examine your organization, staffing, skills, processes, interactions among business areas, practices, support systems and technology, methods to enhance reliability and continuously improve.
We identify gaps and what actions are needed to close those gaps.
Process integration must work well across departmental boundaries.
Example: Maintenance work cannot proceed without the right parts and materials. Schedule success depends on the availability of materials in your storerooms. Demand forecasting is critical but often handled poorly. Without it, maintenance wants a “just-in-case” inventory, and your stores’ personnel want it to be “just-in-time”. The two are often in conflict.
Holding too much material consumes working capital needlessly. Too little leads to stock-outs and excessive downtime. Having the right quantity depends on demand. Stores managers often do well when demand is high and predictable. But some maintenance parts have very low demand, but very high costs. How many you store impacts your risk of downtime and lost revenues.
We examine how well your maintenance work planning and inventory management work together to deliver what you need and when you need it.
We also examine how well operations/production and maintenance schedule downtime, how maintenance and training/human resources work together to provide and develop a workforce with the right skills, knowledge, and abilities, and how they handle both personnel turnover and succession.
What’s it all worth?
Reliable systems and equipment at your operational sites will run longer, produce more, at better quality, and suffer fewer disruptive breakdowns. That improvement in uptime (elimination of downtime) increases revenues.
To achieve that reliability you need the right maintenance program developed in consideration of how things fail and the consequences of those failures. That becomes what many call their “PM (proactive maintenance) Program”. Those proactive, preventive, predictive, and detective tasks are far less costly to perform than unplanned and unscheduled repairs when equipment breaks down. Costs are saved.
That PM program must be executed on schedule to have the desired impact on reliability. That requires competence at managing the work, its planning, scheduling, and the supply of needed parts and materials. When that is achieved workforce productivity increases dramatically – resulting in further cost savings.
Using our Business Case Estimator tool we determine the potential cost savings and revenue generation gains if the recommended improvements are executed properly.
In addition to the business benefits, reliable operations are known to be safer and less prone to environmental risks.
Quick wins
A “quick win” is an activity that will deliver its benefits very quickly. Usually they are easy to implement with the resources you have at hand.
Any assessment will produce a list of potential improvement activities and present them as recommendations. They will range in business value from low to high and in difficulty to implement from easy to challenging.
In the areas of Maintenance and Reliability, those lists can be fairly long. Implementation of some activities may take a year or longer and require considerable help from outside the organization. Other activities are “quick wins” that are well within the capability of the site personnel to address on their own, and in the near term.
When we produce a list of recommended actions we will identify those that we believe to fit in that category of “Quick Wins”. The site, usually without outside help, can get working on those right away and begin to get a payback on your investment in the assessment.
Roadmap
Recommendations from our Rapid Value Assessment must be implemented if the benefits identified are to be realized. Where do you begin? Our “Roadmap” becomes a template plan for the operational site(s) to use as a starting point for detailed planning of their own activities.
We will identify the ease of implementation and the potential value that each activity can generate. That gives us a two-dimensional mapping of the activities. Starting with the “quick wins” (easy to implement) we map out a rough sequence of their implementation. We then modify it to reflect any dependencies among them. This mapping will vary from site to site among your operational locations.
We call this a “roadmap” as it reflects a sequence of major events, rather than a detailed plan. After this assessment is done and assuming there is a decision to proceed with implementation, the site will need to own the plan. Developing a detailed plan occurs as a part of the first steps in implementation at the site. The operational site will know things in more detail than our assessment can reveal in a short time. They must have the opportunity to make the plan theirs. We treat it as a preliminary plan, encourage them to add their own ideas and enhancements, modifying it as they see fit. We facilitate this process to ensure that full value can be achieved. Their inputs and modifications make it theirs, and dramatically reduce resistance to its implementation.
