Welcome to my new blog sponsored by Plant Services - I'm Drew Troyer, a Certified Reliability Engineer and MBA. I specialize in utilizing reliability engineering and management tools to increase the profitability and value of manufacturing and process industry plants and organizations.
With this blog I hope to create a dialogue with you, which will help you create value for your shareholders by deploying proven reliability tools and techniques. I want to help you to right-size and deploy the same framework of reliability management that keeps airplanes from falling out of the sky into your manufacturing plants and organization. But rather than focusing on absolute risk elimination, which is the case in the commercial aviation business, our goal is to maximize Return on Net Assets (RONA) – which is simply profit divided by the equipment, inventory, working cash and other assets required to create the returns. Research tells us that top quartile companies that exhibit industry leading business process characteristics for reliability management enjoy higher availability and yield, less unscheduled downtime and lower maintenance costs. Moving from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile for reliability management practices can double, triple or even quadruple your profits (the RONA numerator) and enable you to lean-out your balance sheet (the RONA denominator). I want to help you find your dot on the percentile spectrum, then help you move your dot to the top quartile level of performance.
This blog is not about maintenance. Too often, reliability is incorrectly assumed to be a better way to do maintenance – this is not the case! My research and experience suggest that equipment accounts for about 20% of our manufacturing losses. Maintenance probably accounts for about half of that. The other 90% of the opportunity associated with moving your dot resides in other functional areas along the value stream – product design, product sales and marketing, plant and equipment design, plant operations, upstream supply chain, downstream supply chain, etc. We’ll deal with all functional aspects of the value stream and, more important, breaking down the barriers between the functional “silos” in your value stream. We may wander, but we’ll never stray from this theme: deploying a proven framework of reliability management = dollars for your organization. I look forward to our weekly visits. I hope you’ll provide me with your feedback and ideas!
Cheers!
Drew D. Troyer, CRE, CMRP