Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability: What You Need to Know

RAM are system design traits that have a significant effect on the sustainment of a production system. These impact the ability of a machine tool to perform its intended purpose affecting overall output. It can be broken down into:

Reliability: This is the machine tool’s ability to function. It may also be referred to as operational reliability.

Availability: This is the percentage of time a machine tool is considered functional.

Maintainability: This is defined as the ease and speed with which a machine tool system can be restored, repaired, and maintained following breakdown or system failure.

Machine Tool Technologies has a team of experts who conduct RAM analysis for global brands. We use sophisticated methods to predict the reliability and availability of your machine tools for production assurance.

Why Conduct RAM Analysis?

A RAM analysis conducts a study of machine tool system components, their configuration, and capacity. MTT experts study reliability data, repair data, operational conditions, resources required, and production profiles which affect production.

A crucial part of RAM analysis is collecting and assessing reliability and repair data. Assessing the data helps certify its accuracy and relevance to the RAM analysis.

Benefits of RAM Analysis

RAM analysis has many benefits. The key among them are:

• It helps identify failure modes and their outcomes
• Accurately predicts and estimates production output and availability
• Estimates production time with reference to demand
• Identifies areas that snag and those that boost production
• Helps justify decisions by determining most cost-efficient solutions to:
  • Process design
  • Preventive maintenance measures
  • Identifying cost-effective strategies
  • Industry performance modes
  • Spare parts production
  • Mobilisation and lead times, and contracts

MTT RAM analysis experts can also perform customised cost-benefit analysis from the results of RAM analysis. This measures your net present value, breakeven price and internal rate of return.

Maintainability Analysis

Maintainability is concerned with how speedily machine tools and other systems can be repaired after failure or breakdown. It takes into consideration preventive maintenance, support equipment, and the training of machine operators.

Maintainability analysis assesses the ease of maintenance and the safety impact for machine operators. MTT engineers and experienced technicians can craft a customised maintenance strategy and set up levels of preventive maintenance through scheduled repairs. Using fault detection and failure identification, as well as machine tool repair lead times can help to identify corrective action procedures on failed modules.

MTT experts can also conduct a full maintenance analysis that includes defining scheduled preventive maintenance and assessing their impacts on system availability.

Contact Machine Tool Technologies for your reliability, availability, and maintainability needs

MTT offers a wide range of services in addition to RAM analysis and maintainability analysis. We also offer manufacturers reliability testing with particular interest in refining and safeguarding your machine tools.

Employing RAM in the early life of machine tools will help you to ensure persistent and active engagement of all stakeholders. This not only ensures reduced breakdowns and lead times, it also boosts performance and significantly reduces costs of production.

Contact us today for machine tool optimisation with RAM.