The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, nist.gov) was formed in 1901, and is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. While most are only aware of their test instruments and device calibration being traceable to NIST, the Institute is actually a collection of physical-science laboratories that focus on measurement and accuracy. The purpose of this work is based on the organization’s original charter to improve United States competitiveness by setting measurement standards of all types, from atomic clocks for time, to advanced nano-materials, the smart-grid, computer chips, even cybersecurity. But NIST does much more. Read on.
Editor’s Note: This article is a follow-up to a recent podcast sponsored by TheRAMReview.com that focused on the studies coming out of NIST’s Manufacturing Machinery Maintenance program and the impact they have on RAM professionals and corporate goals. (See link at end of the end of this article.)
BACKGROUND
NIST’s Manufacturing Machinery Maintenance project was developed to study the costs and benefits of the maintenance aspect of discrete manufacturing in the United States. The program is broken into two projects:
♦ Prognostics and Health Management for Reliable Operations in Smart Manufacturing
♦ Knowledge Extraction and Application for Manufacturing Operations.
As part of these projects, including to provide context on the larger one, the program looked into the costs and benefits of investing in maintenance. Now, with the advent of cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, and Industry 4.0, NIST is pursuing the research to develop and support standards and framework for those systems. To identify the economic impact, researchers split maintenance into three types:
♦ Predictive Maintenance: corrective action based upon failure predictions from a variety of
measurements, such as temperature, noise, vibration or electrical
♦ Preventive Maintenance: maintenance actions performed based on schedule, timed or cycle
♦ Reactive Maintenance: run to failure.
In 2020, the program included the “Economics of Manufacturing Machinery Maintenance: A Survey and Analysis of US Costs and Benefits,” which examined the losses due to inadequate maintenance strategies in NAICS 321-339, excluding NAICS 324 and 325, through a survey. Overall, the estimated expenditures were estimated at $57.3 billion and failures estimated at $16.3 billion in costs and $0.9 billion in maintenance inventory. This totaled $74.5 billion related to manufacturing-machinery maintenance.
The estimated preventable losses amounted to $119.1 billion, which also included $100.2 billion in lost sales from delays and defects. An estimated 16.03 injuries and 0.05 deaths per million employees were also determined to be related to reactive maintenance issues. The survey found that 45.7% of machinery maintenance is reactive in nature. Reactive maintenance companies tend to be those that are cost competitors (commodity) that have the mistaken impression that this type of maintenance strategy provides that benefit.
RESOURCES
The additional laboratory work related to NIST’s research project includes a number of existing datasets and software tools associated with robotics first. One of the prognostic data sets, for example, is the “Degradation Measurement of Robot Arm Position Accuracy,” which was developed for software developers and data scientists who have little to no access to robots that can capture real data. There are also software tools such as NESTOR, which is a free toolkit that helps maintainers annotate work orders through tagging.
There’s clearly an enormous amount of information, free tools, and licensable technology available through NIST that can provide support for your organization, including with standardization and benchmarks. The studies and links to the research and tools can be found here:
https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturing/topics-manufacturing/manufacturing-machinery-maintenance
As noted previously, the details of the referenced research, “Economics of Manufacturing Machinery Maintenance: A Survey and Analysis of U.S. Costs and Benefits,” were discussed with Doug Thomas, the lead economic researcher from NIST, in the first installment of The RAM Review Podcast. Click Here to Listen.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP, is Founder and President of Motor Doc LLC, Lombard, IL and, among other things, a Past Chair of the Society for Reliability and Maintenance Professionals, Atlanta (smrp.org). Email him at howard@motordoc.com, or info@motordoc.com, and/or visit motordoc.com.
Tags: reliability, availability, maintenance, RAM, National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST
