Measuring the maintainability of machines and equipment is essential for efficient and effective maintenance management. If the methods allowing to assess maintainability are well known to maintenance professionals, the difficulty to assess it often lies in the absence of reliable and easily exploitable data.
Therefore, the choice of a CMMS that the teams will really use on a daily basis is important so that the measurement of maintainability is based on correct data.
What is maintainability?
Maintainability is the ability of an asset to be maintained or restored to a state where it can perform a required function
The maintainability of an equipment or a machine is therefore its “capacity” to be quickly repaired. It is also the probability of restoring a system to specified operating conditions, within desired time limits, when maintenance is performed under given conditions, using prescribed procedures and means.
The “prescribed means” include a wide range of concepts: personnel means, equipment, tools, etc.
The different levels of maintainability
Based on these definitions, we can distinguish:
- Intrinsic maintainability: it is “built” during the design phase from specifications that take into account maintainability criteria (modularity, accessibility, etc.).
- Predictive maintainability: it is also “built”, but based on the availability objective.
- Operational maintainability: it will be measured from the history of interventions.
What does it depend on?
The maintainability of an equipment depends on:
- detectability (facilitating localization and diagnosis);
- dismantling (accessibility, standardization of tools, …);
- interchangeability (between modules);
- standardization (of equipment and components, techniques, tools, suppliers, etc.);
- the quality of documentation.
| Equipment-related factors | Manufacturer-related factors | Maintenance-related factors |
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Maintainability is one of the components of equipment availability.
Why measure it?
La compréhension et la lecture des données créées par l’utilisation des métriques de défaillance (MTBF, MTTR, MTTF) aident les professionnels de la maintenance dans l’amélioration continue de leurs programmes et pratiques de maintenance.
Sur la base de ces données, ils peuvent élaborer de meilleures stratégies de gestion des actifs et améliorer leurs processus de maintenance globaux afin d’éviter les défaillances et les dommages causés par les pannes des machines.
How to measure it?
The main indicator of maintainability is the MTTR: Mean Time To Repair. It refers to the time required to repair an asset and restore its full functionality.
MTTR begins at the start of the repair and continues until the repair is complete. It includes the repair time, the test period and the return to normal operating condition.
To calculate the MTTR, divide the total maintenance time by the total number of maintenance actions in a given period.
Benefits of a CMMS
The use of a good CMMS makes it possible to collect reliable and complete data without which it is impossible to effectively measure the maintainability of equipment and to make decisions that will help improve the productivity of the machine park.
To properly manage maintenance, it is therefore recommended to choose a CMMS that will be effectively used on a daily basis by all technicians, so that all the data necessary to measure maintainability is available.
In addition, the chosen CMMS solution must allow easy export of this data to the tools used for calculation, such as Excel or BI.
In this way, maintenance managers can measure the maintainability of each piece of equipment and implement relevant improvements in the maintenance procedures or, if necessary, decide to replace the machines.
Obtain spare parts more easily thanks to a community-based CMMS
As we have seen above, being able to easily obtain all types of spare parts improves the maintainability of a machine. In this sense, having industrial suppliers’ catalogs directly in the CMMS is a clear advantage.
