What Is Design, Operate, Maintain Performance Optimization?
Achieving winning performance is a constant challenge for all manufacturers. Customer requirements, material costs and regulatory requirements can change on a daily basis and agility and continuous improvement have become basic requirements for maintaining cost leadership and competitive advantage.
Today’s fierce, global competition demands higher performance from all manufacturing facilities. Many operations have already optimized operating practices and control systems, leaving little room for improvement during actual production. More flexible production systems and better plant availability remain major problems and offer significant opportunities for raising the bar.
Production assets represent an enormous investment for many manufacturers. Optimizing their performance is critical to meeting corporate goals and demands a well-defined strategy. Status quo approaches are no longer adequate to meet these challenges. Today’s asset-intensive manufacturer needs to understand and exploit new ideas, technologies, and practices to keep up with competitors and secure future success.
Design, Operate, and Maintain – Three Key Factors of Performance
Design, Operate and Maintain (DOM) are ARC’s names for the three key factors that determine Plant Performance:
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Design - Having the right set of assets to satisfy customer needs
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Operate - Optimizing use of these assets during each production run
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Maintain – Ensuring that assets always have maximum production availability
Companies that recognize the importance of these factors and have proper DOM strategies respond faster to market shifts and have more profitable operations.
An effective DOM strategy includes programs to drive excellence in each factor. But this is not sufficient to guarantee optimal Plant Performance. DOM factors are highly interdependent and a proper strategy also includes seamless collaboration across programs to ensure that actions are coordinated and focused on common goals.
Design, Operate, and Maintain Interoperability
Like many things, interdependence is a blessing and a curse. When interdependence is understood and exploited, the impact of individual efforts can be amplified. When interdependence is not recognized and managed, efforts to improve performance can be frustrated by negative effects upon other DOM factors. While it may be easier to manage independent programs, understanding and dealing with interdependence is a reality that must be addressed.
Designers, Operators, and Maintenance Personnel require specialized systems to optimize their performance. But information and business processes must be integrated and coordinated across all areas to achieve synchronized action. DOM Interoperability is thus an additional, critical component of every successful DOM strategy.
What are the Benefits of DOM?
An effective DOM Strategy can bring large returns for asset-intensive manufacturers:
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A recent NIST study estimated annual losses due to the lack of interoperability within the North American Capital Projects Industry alone to be $16B. Almost $10B of this is owner/operator losses occurring in the Operate and Maintain Lifecycle Stages.
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Several industry studies have concluded that only 30% of a maintenance worker’s time can actually be categorized as “wrench time”. Reasons include excessive time locating information, waiting for parts, poor coordination with operations and dealing with excessive paperwork. Low wrench time reduces production time, lower revenues and increases maintenance costs.
Most asset-intensive manufacturers experience at least one of these problems and have the opportunity to use DOM to drive significant improvements in Plant Performance.
How Can ARC Help?
ARC’s analysts can help you analyze your current DOM performance and identify the best opportunities for improvement. They can also educate you on technologies and best practices that you can use to improve your performance and help you select the solutions that are most suitable for your company.
Functioning as members of your own internal DOM team, ARC’s analysts can add our unique knowledge of technologies, suppliers and other DOM programs to accelerate your continuous improvement efforts.
For more information contact us at
info@arcweb.com.