Downtime Reduction via Improved Instrument Reliability

Shadrach Stephens and Christopher Garcia served on the Instrument Reliability team at the Dow Chemical Deer Park facility that established a program delivering a 70 percent reduction in downtime. This program continues to be successful because it provides instrumentation professionals a formal structure to improve instrument reliability across the site. The framework for the program’s strategy focuses on two main categories: 1) short-term and long-term strategies; and 2) four maintenance improvement areas—reactive, proactive, reliability-centered, and instrument projects. In their presentation at The Automation Conference 2014, Stephens and Garcia explained the Instrument Reliability team's downtime-reducing program and how the strategy supporting it was developed and implemented. See their presentation from the conference below.