Is Being “Within 1 Percent Reliability” of Competitors Good Enough?

The latest Sprint Wireless TV ads features a spokesperson that used to represent Verizon Wireless in the “can you hear me now?” ads of a few years ago. Now he is saying that everyone should switch to Sprint because it is less expensive and “within 1 percent reliability” of Verizon’s service. This made me think; Is “within 1 percent reliability” good enough. It might be for mobile phone users, but if you are producing a product, is it good enough?

So I did some math. One percent less reliable over the course of a year translates into 87.6 hours of unreliable operation. If this means shutdown, can you afford this much outage? Worse, if it puts your plant into an unsafe condition, can you tolerate this?

For all practical purposes, it is virtually impossible to run a plant, year after year, without some sort of outage. Often this is measured as the OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) KPI. Or perhaps it might be a measure more specific to the control application’s reliability such as APC Utilization, that measures the percentage of the time that the Advanced Process Control is functioning properly while the process is operating. For example, if your OEE or APC Utilization is at 97 percent, should you be satisfied? Do you know if this is good compared to your peer organizations?

To me, the bottom line is to know what your reliability is by measuring it. Then, whether you compare your various KPIs internally within your plants or you compare to others in your industry, you will know what is achievable. While 97 percent might sound good, an extra one percent improvement will give you over 87.6 hours of reliability. How much is that worth to your operations?