Support service agreements help optimize manufacturing asset and operational performance

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In today’s highly volatile manufacturing environment, achieving the highest return on investment (ROI) while sustaining new or existing high-performing operational levels can be challenging. Organizations must integrate support, maintenance, and performance improvements into their daily processes to remain competitive, address industry challenges, and achieve ambitious business goals.

But how do you achieve this?

Support service agreements, also referred to as service plans, can help manufacturing businesses:

• Track and improve their performance levels
• Meet complex operational goals
• Achieve the desired ROI
• Identify and protect business-critical systems or assets
• Ensure maximum uptime and performance with a much lower risk of business disruptions

Manufacturers can realize significant long-term cost savings, increase system longevity, and boost production efficiency.

Challenges to realizing optimized asset performance

Increasingly complex business challenges require manufacturers to adopt faster, more advanced technologies to remain competitive. For instance, safeguarding against cyber threats may require investing in more modern, secure systems to protect data and minimize downtime risks. Yet, these threats change so quickly that systems can become obsolete sooner than expected, impeding asset performance and efficiency. 

From a marketplace standpoint, organizations may struggle to retain or transfer institutional knowledge as a highly skilled and experienced workforce retires. The ever-increasing market competition also pressures manufacturers to maintain high-quality product standards while complying with stringent and evolving safety, regulatory, and environmental compliance requirements.

Organizations approaching these challenges in isolation, or only when time and budget allow, risk disrupting the balance of integrating people, processes, and technology to achieve and sustain robust operational performance. If implementing this level of integration is difficult, organizations can still maintain their current performance levels. However, this approach is limited at best.

This is where support service agreements come in to help manufacturers optimize asset and operational performance, gain a competitive advantage, and increase their asset ROI.

Proactive services help sustain performance

The short-term view of support service agreements revolves around a simple “break/fix” approach, which does not account for the complexity of interconnected processes, systems, or frameworks in manufacturing. Instead, outside experts take a holistic view of how your people, processes, and technology function synergistically to maximize performance for the long term.

The purpose of support service agreements is to enable companies to proactively maintain their asset performance levels rather than doing so reactively only when issues arise. For instance, identifying risks such as equipment nearing the end of its lifecycle or requiring spare parts long before the asset breaks down helps mitigate potential system downtime.

With options like cybersecure connectivity infrastructure, experts can securely and remotely access an organization’s systems to help troubleshoot production issues, identify areas of operational improvement, or track compliance with security requirements. Such digitally augmented maintenance also improves production efficiency and reliability as people, processes, and technology interact at manufacturing facilities – enabling organizations to gain more value from assets throughout their lifecycle.

By outsourcing support services, manufacturers can also realize significant cost savings. If a critical pump breaks down, for example, an established support service agreement can help an organization save $110,000 annually on the incident’s impact and reduce the downtime per incident by an hour.

Gain more value from your assets

Faced with volatile markets, ambitious sustainability targets, or stringent compliance regulations, manufacturers looking to scale or improve their operations should partner with consulting experts with a deep, specific, and holistic understanding of industry best practices. These experts can extract and apply valuable insights to help you gain a competitive edge and achieve optimal production performance and reliability.

To learn more about the full benefits of investing in support service agreements, download our white paper, “Support Service Agreements: Optimizing Operational Asset Performance to Create a Competitive Advantage.”