When it comes to running a successful business, asset availability is an essential metric for measuring and maintaining peak efficiency. Whether you’re a maintenance manager or technician, understanding and efficiently managing the availability of your assets can have a major impact on productivity levels. While it’s one area of asset management that is often overlooked by business owners because they don’t quite understand what it means in practice, having the right information available can enable them to make data-driven decisions – enabling maximum uptime without compromising cost or safety. In this post, we’ll explore what asset availability means, how best to manage it, and why tracking it should be one of your top priorities.
What is Asset Availability?
Asset availability is a key performance indicator (KPI) that plays an integral role in the success of any business operation. It measures the amount of an organization’s equipment that is available at any given time. Furthermore, you can use it as a metric for assessing the performance of your organization’s maintenance efforts. This metric expresses the likelihood that an asset will be able to successfully carry out its intended function under specified conditions. As you use the equipment, the asset’s availability will gradually decrease. If you don’t upgrade the asset, the availability will not improve.
Availability vs. Reliability vs. Maintainability
The terms reliability and maintainability are frequently used in conjunction with availability, as they are three interrelated concepts. To meet the necessary level of availability needs, you must comprehend the relationship of trade-offs between the two. It is a crucial component of the RAM (Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability) analysis. Additionally, asset reliability focuses on the frequency of failure, while availability focuses on whether or not the equipment was operational.
Asset Availability Example
Let’s say you need a machine for 10 hours per day. It takes 30 minutes to turn on and requires one hour of daily maintenance. That means it is only available for 8.5 hours per day. Understanding an asset’s availability helps you anticipate delays in production and set realistic goals. It is essential to note that maintenance plays a big part in preventing or improving asset availability issues. If you can optimize the planning of preventive maintenance around production times and improve the response time to unexpected failures, you can improve asset availability.
How to Calculate Asset Availability
The total operating time and the total downtime must be combined in a formula to determine asset availability. The equipment is in operation any moment it is performing its intended job. Contrarily, downtime, which includes both scheduled and unscheduled downtime, is the period when the equipment is not available to perform its function.
Availability = Runtime / (Runtime + Downtime)
Let’s apply this formula. An asset was in use for 150 hours in the previous month. During the month, the asset broke down twice, and it took three hours to fix each time. On top of that, the equipment was off for ten hours for inspections. At the end of the month, that means the asset’s runtime is 150 hours and downtime is 16 hours. To calculate availability, you would do the following:
Availability = 150 / (150 + 16)
Availability = .903 or 90.3%
Improving Asset Availability
The entire organization benefits greatly from increased asset availability. Enhancing asset availability is vital because it directly impacts company revenue. As a result, the maintenance teams’ role is crucial because they are in charge of boosting asset availability through maintenance procedures that reduce failures. However, that requires utilizing maintenance resources effectively and maintaining peak output levels. Maximizing asset availability can be a challenging task for larger and more complicated machines or facilities. A Computerized Maintenance Management System or CMMS software can help you by optimizing maintenance schedules and resources and facilitating the completion of maintenance operations.
