MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) is the gold standard indicator for measuring the reliability of a repairable asset. It represents the average time between one repaired failure and the next incident on the same equipment.
Simplified Formula: (Total Operating Time) / (Number of Failures)
A high MTBF is a good sign: it means the system runs correctly for a long time without interruptions. A low MTBF indicates instability and constant failures.
Why is it critical to calculate?
MTBF answers the most important financial question: Is it worth continuing to repair this or is it time to buy a new one? If an LED luminaire has a decreasing MTBF (breaking down more and more frequently), the cost of sending a crew to repair it will quickly exceed the cost of replacing it with a new one. Without this data, companies throw money at endless repairs of obsolete equipment.
MTBF and territory in Maptainer
For assets spread across a territory, failure is not always the equipment's fault; sometimes it's the environment's fault. Maptainer calculates MTBF by asset type from the real intervals between incidents on each asset, and paints the density of work orders and incidents over the last 90 days on the map as a heat map. Together they reveal patterns that a spreadsheet cannot show.
Example: if incidents on the trackers of a solar plant concentrate in the same area, the problem is probably not the motors, but the ground, the drainage, or the cabling in that section. Crossing MTBF with the geographic distribution of failures helps look for the root cause where it is.