Knowing The MTBF Helps You Keep Your Factory Running
Your factory depends on all of your machines working all of the time. However, that isn't how it works. There are times when your machines are going to break down. You can minimize that time by doing preventive maintenance. But, you need to know when to do that maintenance to prevent breakdowns. One way to do that is to track the mean time between failures.
Mean Time Between Failures
MTBF calculation helps to find the average time between breakdowns on any specific machine. Each machine is going to have its MTBF. Knowing the MTBF and what caused each breakdown will let you know when you should do any preventive maintenance on that machine and what kind needs to be done when.
Measuring MTBF
To get the MTBF, you need to keep track of the machine and how it has been functioning for a while. There are a few things that you will have to track to measure the MTBF. One is how much uptime the machine has. You measure that from the end of a breakdown to the beginning of the next uptime. So, if the machine broke down at 11:25 am and was down until 4:25 pm, that's a five-hour downtime. You would start the timer at 4:25 pm until it breaks down again, which might be at 4:25 the next day, giving you an uptime of 24 hours. That number gets written down, along with what caused the failure. That uptime will need to be tracked so that you get a large enough selection to get some accurate numbers. When you have those numbers, you can figure out the MTBF.
Figuring MTBF
The way that MTBF is figured is that you add up all the tracked uptimes, then divide that number by how many uptimes were added together. So, if you tracked the uptimes and have 10 that you added together and got a sum of 450, you would then divide that number by 10, giving you an average mean time between failures of 45 hours. Not all of the numbers are going to be that easy to work with, and the more numbers you have, the easier it is to make a mistake. One way to eliminate that is to use an MTBF calculator. The calculator can do all the math work, all you need to do is put the numbers from your tracking and let the calculating tool handle everything for you.
If you run a factory, you need to make sure that your equipment is going to work all the time. Preventive maintenance and the MTBF can help with that.