10/30/2007

Executive Summary

In asset intensive industries, such as automotive, metals, mining, oil and gas, process manufacturing, utilities, and the public sector, the reliability and productivity of capital assets is essential to an organizations financial success. Maintenance of these assets can dramatically impact the overall performance and useful life of an asset. Accordingly, asset owners/operators and asset service providers are continually trying to improve their maintenance practices. This benchmark report focuses on the strategies, processes, and technologies organizations are using to refine and enhance the effectiveness of their maintenance operations.

Key Business Value Findings

Preventive Maintenance (PM) is the dominant maintenance strategy in asset intensive industries, but more proactive maintenance approaches, such as predictive maintenance and reliability centered maintenance processes produce greater asset performance.

Nearly half of all survey respondents report the same common challenges in improving asset maintenance including:

• Insufficient data available on asset performance and service history,
• Management does not see maintenance as a top priority, and
• Disjointed, nonstandard maintenance processes prevail.

Best-in-class organizations reap substantially larger benefits from improved maintenance practices than do average and laggard establishments, including:

• Significantly improved asset reliability,
• Greater asset uptime and availability,
• Lower costs of servicing assets,
• Fewer unexpected downtimes and outages, and
• A higher return in invested capital.

Implications & Analysis

Best-in-class organizations share many common traits, to name just a few:

• A senior-level executive heads up all asset maintenance operations at more best-in-class organizations than is the case in average and laggard establishments;
• They employ additional proactive maintenance strategies to augment their preventive maintenance activities; and
• They establish and systematically monitor specific KPIs on a routine and regularly scheduled basis.

Recommendations for Action

• Implement aggressive proactive maintenance strategies.
• Ensure that maintenance and operations staff collaborate to optimize maintenance schedules.
• Use analytics software to measure actual asset performance against established goals.
• Centralize management and control of asset maintenance.
• Build a case for the CFO regarding the importance of investing to support proper service and maintenance practices.
• Consider spare parts/MRO inventory planning solutions.

For a free copy of the full report, go to: www.alliedreliability.com/admin/files2/files/proact.pdf

About the AberdeenGroup

Founded in 1998, the AberdeenGroup is the technology- driven research destination of choice for the global business executive. Aberdeen Group has over 100,000 research members in over 36 countries around the world that both participate in and direct the most comprehensive technology-driven value chain research in the market. Through its continued fact-based research, benchmarking, and actionable analysis, Aberdeen Group offers global business and technology executives a unique mix of actionable research, KPIs, tools, and services.

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