Every business should have the proper controls and measures in place to be as efficient as possible. Efficiency is often key to success, and setting up the right availability controls for the assets is one of the many factors that contribute to the best possible efficiency. For that reason, we have what we call Availability Metrics: a system to monitor the stats of your availability. Knowing what to look for and to account for is very important.
After a while, knowing your availability metrics will help you have a better availability management policy, and tracking progress that way will be second nature. Data collected from such availability metrics systems is essential to the availability managers, be it in a large enterprise or a small company. This data is what gives the availability manager an idea to how the plan moving forward should be. But before we continue on with the availability metrics per se, it’s good to talk about key concepts and terms.
Key Concepts
First off, let’s talk about availability: it’s the definition of whether a system or machine is able to fulfill its intended function at any given time. Basically, it’s a measuring tool used to determine if an asset is ready to perform or not, for how long it’s able to perform, and for how long it’s not able to. In that regard, we also have two different terms: uptime, for when there is availability and the asset is actively performing, and downtime, for when there is no availability.
Those concepts are important to determine other mathematical end measuring functions to help any maintenance system work smoothly. There is an easy equation that can help us determine the percentage of your availability using those metrics, and it goes like this:
This percentage is used to determine how well an asset’s availability has performed, but also to determine how well it will perform in the future. The ideal is to have this percentage as high as possible. Some industries measures the availability percentage by the amount of 9s in the digits (mostly IT related), and having 5 nines is regarded as a good standard (99,999% availability).
Measurement Good Practices
The first thing any availability measurement needs to have is to have clearly understood metrics. It’s very important that your availability metrics are representing reality, whilst avoiding any projections or hypothetical scenarios. To that end, working with your customers or operators to obtain a realistic measure is critical. Measuring the availability metrics of any given asset should be as precise as possible, in order to avoid problems with the availability of the assets themselves.
Another big thing that should be taken into consideration is that the measurement of the availability of any given asset must be done over the required timeframe for that measurement to have any real use for a business. If the goal is to enter and process maintenance orders while the business is open, there is no point in measuring availability while the business is closed. Doing so can dilute the availability metrics over time that is not important to be factored in. Obviously, the same goes for off-hours, weekends, and holidays.
Looking for and reporting downtime is very important here. If an asset is not available, measuring the time it took for it to become available again is your downtime measurement. It’s important to know when such downtime happened – was it a one-time issue with an asset? Was it an operator mistake? Was it during an expected maintenance time? By measuring things in such a way so you can understand how the downtime happened, how often, and why. Finding out solutions for those downtimes and optimizing time is much easier if you have this information.
Conclusion
Understanding and using availability metrics is a great way to optimize your business process, and your asset time management, and even help avoid service outages in some cases. But one thing must be clear: collecting this data is not always easy or straightforward. The biggest challenge in the availability metrics’ calculation is collecting all of the necessary and real service time data. There are many ways to collect such data with precision and accuracy. You could use numbers from service desk tickets, from maintenance log books, and gather manual input from customers and operators.
But why waste time with unreliable – and often not precise – data collection methods? What if you could have all of this data collected automatically, from all sources in a consolidated platform? For that, and much more, OneView is the way to go – one simple and powerful platform to collect all of the data simultaneously for you.
Contact us for a free demo presentation of the OneView system and learn more!
