Benchmarking is nothing new to facility managers, data center operators, and co-location providers. Establishing proper facility management benchmarking is key to knowing how your products, processes, services, and operations stack up against the competition. This knowledge based on actual practice helps your teams be more reliable and safe – leading to significant cost savings and an increased return on investment.
But what if your assets are failing to perform as advertised?
For colocation and data center operations and asset management, knowing how your assets perform against a global benchmark among similar assets is invaluable information and something that you can only get with Mission Critical Information Management (MCIM).
Why is reliability benchmarking important?
Reliability benchmarking puts your data center metrics into context. Sure, you can see the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) for an asset, but without comparing the data to other assets it’s hard to know if your rate is OK or a cause for concern.
By implementing a continuous process where you monitor and improve your performance by comparing data over time, you begin to get a real-world picture of how your teams are operating and start making changes.
Which metrics you want to measure and to which degree largely depends on the type of benchmarking you want to do. A couple of main approaches are:
- Internal Benchmarking is where you compare two data points among different departments, buildings, teams, etc. within your company. This data is the easiest for a company to collect and can help teams learn from one another and set company standards.
- External Benchmarking is where you compare a range of your metrics against other companies like you to see how you stack up in the market. This can be to ensure you’re meeting industry standards or aiming for best-in-class but also requires greater insight into how other companies are operating and can be time-consuming to gather.
While both Internal and External Benchmarking in facility management are key to improving performance and cost savings, they often focus only on processes related to your facilities and assets. But how an asset performs can be impacted by factors outside of your team’s control before it even arrives at your facility – from make and model to how long they sat on a shelf before they were shipped to when and where they were manufactured and more.
Most software solutions only provide your internal benchmarking statistics but require manual efforts pulling information from multiple siloed systems to determine where you stand – and often the data is outdated by the time the report is complete.
For external benchmarking, most of the time the dataset is opaque and unnamed, stripping any true value that only comes with the transparency of this information and confidence that it is standardized in your asset management platform.
MCIM solves for both of these benchmarking needs by providing a single source of truth for your business, becoming your data center’s operating system. Not only does MCIM provide complete, real-time insights into all of your assets for internal benchmarking, but MCIM is the only platform providing in-depth and transparent global asset benchmarking.
Knowing how your assets perform against competitors with the same or comparable equipment helps you make better capital planning decisions and can let you know if you have the best tools you need to deliver service to your customers.
Why do you need asset reliability benchmarking?
Asset reliability benchmarking is key to determining the strength of your overall operations and data center facility health. By comparing the performance of your assets against the known reliability of other companies, you gain better insights into the reliability of your assets and areas for improvement. Some values of asset reliability benchmarking include:
- Identifying inefficiencies – By comparing the performance of your facility and assets against industry standards and averages, you can better identify inefficiencies in your processes and the assets themselves.
- Performance monitoring – Asset reliability benchmarking provides a way for facility managers to monitor the performance of your assets over time. In time, you’ll be able to identify trends and patterns and take corrective action before the issues become significant problems.
- Prioritizing investments – By comparing asset performance against industry benchmarks, facility managers can identify which assets are in need of the most attention and prioritize investments accordingly. Seeing how assets from different manufacturers and models compare to one another also helps you make better buying decisions.
Asset reliability benchmarking
For each of your assets you want to measure key data to determine its overall reliability, and remaining life cycle, and plan long-term operating costs. But sometimes asset data can vary between vendors, makes and models, or even among the same models coming off the production line at the same time.
When doing data collection on your assets, there are key measurements you want to have to determine reliability and facility condition, such as:
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
- Average age at failure
- Frequency distribution of top failure models
- Top causes for failure
- Cost of maintenance
- Reactive vs. preventive maintenance ratio
- Labor ratios
Without knowing how these metrics measure up against similar assets, how are you supposed to know if you’re getting the most out of your assets or total building performance? How can you optimize your internal processes, SOPs and MOPs to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible and staying ahead of your competition?
MCIM’s asset reliability benchmarking reports
With MCIM, you gain not only greater insight into your data, but into industry data and asset reliability benchmarking that will help you know how other assets are performing even outside of your company, empowering you to make better buying decisions, improve processes, and deliver a better service to your customers than your competitors on other systems.
MCIM is the only option on the market with in-depth asset reliability benchmarking, underpinned by more than ten years of data from existing clients already part of the benchmarking pool. Unlike other CMMS, EAM, or facility management systems, MCIM’s approach keeps your data out of silos, giving you real time insights into your entire portfolio and allowing you to get more out of your data.
With a benchmarking process, the impact on a company’s decision making is immediate and can save companies thousands of dollars by lowering maintenance costs, highlighting cost savings across asset purchases, and helping avoid costly downtimes and disruption of services.
MCIM asset reliability benchmarking in action: Identifying and preempting systemic battery failures
For one client, the benchmarking data showed not only installation issues among UPS’s, but that a supplier had been selling older batteries held in storage, leading to high infant mortality and a far shorter useful life than most other brands available.
Armed with data from MCIM, the client was able to:
- Make battery supplier decisions informed by field reliability
- Revise their commissioning policy and develop manufacturer specific installation notes
- Inform forecasting for capital planning budgets
Asset reliability benchmarking for maintenance management
Benchmarking data provides value before the point of failure. Companies can utilize benchmarking reports to analyze manufacturers and assets across an array of metrics to make better purchasing decisions.
MCIM’s reliability benchmarking reports let you compare data across manufacturers and see which models have:
- Fewer number of incidents per asset
- The highest age at failure
- The best average Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MBTF)
- Lower than industry average failures by failure type
You can’t get a true performance measurement of your facility management team without knowing the reliability of the assets they’re monitoring. With MCIM’s benchmarking tool, you can easily see how your assets are performing against a global benchmark for the same make, model, asset category and more. It’s an informational edge that lets you make better business decisions, set achievable KPIs, allow your teams to work more efficiently, let your CFO breathe easier, and leave the competition in the rearview.
