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How Manufacturers Achieve Predictable Production at Lower Costs

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Learn more about the role of effective asset management 

Predictable production and lower costs remain essential in today's fast-paced manufacturing landscape. Effective asset management has proven to be crucial for optimizing cost strategies. Assets should be seen as resources from which companies can create greater value, not just as items that break down and incur repair costs. 

Companies often struggle with foundational asset management principles, which can lead to challenges in maintaining costs, staying ahead of failures and securing broader support from top management. 

To realize this value, companies must change their overall mindset of how they approach asset maintenance. 

What Manufacturers Should Start Doing

Most organizations struggle with over- or under-maintaining their assets and maintenance often falls victim to cost-cutting measures. This reactive approach to asset management can be detrimental, as it forces companies to constantly fight fires instead of implementing strategic plans. By adopting these three key practices, manufacturers can shift to a proactive asset management practice. 

Three Key Practices to Adopt 

    1. Trust Data: Manufacturers often think their data isn't good enough for meaningful improvements. Significant progress can be made with imperfect data. Start to use existing data to drive improvements and reduce uncertainty.
    2. Adopt Proactive Maintenance Tools: Reactive maintenance, that is, waiting for failures to occur before addressing them, leads to higher costs and unexpected downtime. Shift to proactive maintenance using condition-monitoring technologies and predictive analytics to identify potential issues before they escalate to prevent catastrophic failures and optimize asset performance.
    3. Simplify Improvement Processes: Many believe that excellence in asset management requires large, complex projects. Improvements can be made incrementally with simpler steps. Focus on immediate, actionable steps that lead to gradual but significant improvements. Start with small, continuous adjustments and leverage existing processes and expertise. 

Trust the data, switch to proactive maintenance and simplify improvement processes to achieve significant operational excellence with manageable and effective steps. 

Four Steps to Effective Asset Management 

Manufacturers can enhance efficiency and reduce costs by understanding risks, developing strategies, monitoring plans and continuously improving processes.  

There are four essential steps to achieve effective asset management:  

    1. Understanding the risks
    2. Developing and implementing asset protection strategies
    3. Monitoring the asset management strategy
    4. Continuous review and improvement. 

Watch our on-demand webinar, "Asset Management: Safely Maximizing Predictable Production at the Lowest Sustainable Cost," to learn more about these four steps toward effective asset management, and how asset management maximizes production at the lowest sustainable cost. Discover practical steps, real-world examples and insights from industry experts to help your organization achieve operational excellence.