4 key goals successful industrial operations focus on

Bringing a production facility online represents a huge investment. It typically takes years of planning, design, construction and finally, you move into operating the plant. Whether your operation has been running for 20 years or is about to start up, you face the ongoing challenge to achieve the highest returns possible on that investment. Once you have the initial bugs worked out and achieve the goals of targeted productivity, efficiency, quality and performance, how do you sustain high performance, or improve it?

Achieving the business goal of maximizing profits and overall value requires a balance between many factors. Companies that rely on automation systems must strive to get the most out of their operational assets, balancing short term and long term objectives.
Successful operations focus on four key goals:

• Protect Critical Investments – Sustain and extend the life of business-critical production hardware and software systems. 
• Maximize Asset Performance – Focus on production assets to optimize productivity and performance.
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership – Balance short term budgets with longer term needs to effectively manage overall costs.
• Improve Operational Performance – Seek proactive opportunities to improve overall operational performance.

Leading companies are integrating Support, Maintenance and Performance Improvement services to sustain and improve operational performance, maintain a competitive edge and achieve business goals.

Source: Wonderware.com, White paper: Support – A Competitive Weapon (Brian Courchesne)

Over the next several blog posts, I plan to present a perspective on Support Services as a competitive weapon to not only sustain current operations performance levels, but to continually improve them – and to be able to measure the ROI of an ongoing Support program. Special thanks to Brian Courchesne for the White paper: Support – A Competitive Weapon. Stay tuned.