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Organisations use key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge their progress toward a business goal. Like how individuals track their development, maintenance organisations can use metrics to assess the efficiency and spot areas for improvement. If you work with assets or equipment, you should know one crucial measure: MTBF. In this article, we define MTBF, explore its significance, lay out how to calculate it, list ways to make it better, and give examples of how to calculate and use MTBF.
What is the MTBF?
The average interval between a breakdown or failure of an asset is measured by the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). It has to do with unforeseen maintenance and ignores planned maintenance, which includes inspections, preventative part replacements, and machine calibrations. MTBF is a dependability metric that can assist businesses in making data-driven decisions about:
- Equipment design
- Inventory management
- Maintenance scheduling
- Safety practices
Some asset manuals have MTBF estimates. It's crucial to determine this measure on your own, though. The manual's figures need to consider human factors like assembly, design, or maintenance, which could impact the precise MTBF of your asset. You can use the following calculation to get the mean time between failures for the assets owned by your business:
MTBF = number of operational hours/number of failures
Why is MTBF crucial?
MTBF is useful for figuring out how frequently a particular kind of failure might happen or how likely it is for an asset to fail within a certain amount of time. This helps you in avoiding unanticipated downtimes and costly machine failures or repairs. The MTBF may also assist you in deciding whether it is more cost-effective to keep repairing an asset or to replace it entirely.
You may enhance your inventory management procedures by better understanding MTBF. You can optimise your maintenance, repair, and operation (MRO) inventory by estimating MTBF, which allows you to determine how long an asset will last before failing. This assists you in maintaining the minimum quantities required for repairs and directs you only to carry out maintenance and repairs as necessary, keeping costs down.
How to determine MTBF
If you're interested in learning how to calculate MTBF, then follow these steps:
Establish guidelines
Establish the MTBF's parameters. Choose the period you want to review, such as failures during a day, week, month, or year. Define what failure means, such as when a system or component no longer achieves the desired or expected results. For instance, a coffee shop may view a coffee grinder's complete failure as a failure, whereas a manufacturer may see it when a machine stops generating the required number of parts per minute.
Gather data
Obtain accurate information from the equipment. This makes sure that the MTBF you estimate is precise. Because each asset runs under different conditions and is affected by other human factors, data collection is crucial rather than estimation or reference to asset manuals.
Determine operating hours
Calculate the asset's total operational hours. If you're figuring out the MTBF of a single asset, you might add up all the working hours throughout your designated time frame. However, you can add up all operating hours and divide the result by the number of assets if you're figuring out the MTBF of many units of the same type of asset. For instance, a frozen yoghurt business might multiply the number of its soft-serve machines by the number of hours it is open.
Quantify the number of errors
To ascertain the number of failures, consult the data. Being aware that you are just choosing events from your selected period while you evaluate the data is crucial. If you're calculating the MTBF of several assets of the same type, sum the failures of each machine to get the overall failure rate.
Determine MTBF
You can compute MTBF once you have your data and contributing factors. Subtract the number of failures from the total number of operating hours. The number of hours between failures is the outcome. For instance, an asset has an MTBF of 15 hours if it experiences four losses during a window of 60 operational hours over a week.