IMC-2019 Focused Forum 46:54 Minutes

by John Reeve, EDI

There are two separate worlds when it comes to asset management and both think they can do without the other. If they only knew, how much impact they could have if they combine forces. Consider for a moment the MTBF metric. Almost every reliability leader has this in their vocabulary. But wouldn’t they be surprised to know that this metric cannot be extracted from their CMMS. Perhaps there needs to be a new role that can communicate between the reliability folks and the CMMS professionals. This role might be a business analyst. 

The conversation would go like this:

[Reliability Leader] We need to identify MTBF. I’ve seen some calculations that look at the amount of downtime on assets.

[CMMS Professional] We aren’t capturing downtime.

[Reliability Leader] There is a SCADA system that looks at downtime.

[CMMS Professional] Yes, but this is not connected. And that really is only for a very few assets.

[Reliability Leader] Why don’t we then capture functional failure?

[CMMS Professional] Okay. But we have to add that field; alter procedures; and train staff. But, how will the Technician or whomever know that a functional failure occurred?

[Reliability Leader] We will have to emphasize this in training, and also think about storing asset functions inside the CMMS for ready access.

[CMMS Professional] Okay, this sounds like a plan. But we still need to sit together to define the SQL for calculating MTBF using this new field.

[Reliability Leader] What’s SQL?