Enterprise Availability Profiling

With the increased focus on asset management in material and data processing, techniques that incorporate not only availability but also criticality assessment are required.

R2A addressed these needs with Enterprise Availability Profiling (EAP), a top-down solution-based process with a particular focus on boundary (external) threats, as well as common mode failures within the model boundary. The use of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to ensure transparent decision making at all levels of management.

The approach can provide benefits to a wide range of customer service industries, their customers and industry regulators for example, gas, water, rail, marine, aviation and power. Customers will see the benefits in specification and performance reporting on the actual service received (quality and continuity of service and supply). Industry will be able to improve the efficiency of their methods used to deliver this service. The regulator will able to better evaluate the price/service trade-off for industry.

The R2A development process for Enterprise Availability Profiling is shown in the diagram opposite. The process' primary strength is that the high level context is tightly defined so that the final availability profile meets the needs and expectation of boards, customers and regulators. That is, enterprise availability profiling really means contextually tight availability profiling. This contrasts with the more usual approach to availability, which is commonly done as a stair process from the bottom-up which, whilst not wrong, tends to leave the senior players with an uncertainty as to the precise meaning of the results. In a sense this is risk engineers putting into the overall operating context the work of equipment reliability engineers.