Open Access

Günther Schuh, Jochen Berbner, Bert Lorenz, Bastian Franzkoch, Cord-Philipp Winter

• One of the major tasks of operations managers is to boost uptime while simultaneously keeping budget. To meet this challenge they discover reliability-based management as strategic factor to improve performance. But which parameters are the key to “reliability excellence” and drive a company’s performance? What are the relevant levers to pull in reliability-based management? To answer these questions McKinsey & Company partnered with Aachen University to launch a global reliability survey in process industries. Objective of the initiative is to provide a statistically proven picture of key factors that drive maintenance and reliability excellence. Furthermore benchmarks and best practices concerning overall operational performance will be identified. The study is based on a questionnaire-based approach which addresses all relevant departments within a company, complemented by best practice analyses. This paper provides results of the survey. The results demonstrate that reliability pays off. Some unproven beliefs have been confirmed (e.g. a good reliability performance results in a low spare part inventory) but also surprises like a correlation between safety and performance were identified. The analysis also shows that structural differences like company size or geography do not influence reliability performance.