Production facilities – whether producing cars for consumers or sub-atomic particles for scientific experiments – face common challenges; how to get the most from a complex web of expensive assets (equipment) which need to work together seamlessly from start (order or user request) to finish (delivery of product or publication of science paper).
We take an ‘evidence-based’ approach to improvement of such operations. By applying our data analysis and OR modelling capabilities we are able to provide clients with:

• Output Measures – Agreed measures for judging good performance;
• Process Description – A clear picture of the end-to-end delivery process, the critical items of equipment (assets) and resources;
• Bottleneck Assets – An understanding of the bottleneck assets and how they limit output. This could be because of excessive ‘down-time’, shortage of a key resource (e.g. engineer) or limited capacity;
• Options Analysis – To show where changing the approach to asset maintenance (perhaps adopting a Predictive approach), scheduling of jobs or optimal control of key assets could boost output or quality;
• Boost to Operations – Recommendations for changing operations to deliver more and where better data capture or analysis could give managers the tools they need.

RED has successfully applied this capability to help senior management at the STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon facility understand where changes to accelerator maintenance philosophy, resourcing and user run-time could boost scientific outputs.