Considering an Asset Performance Management

Considering an Asset Performance Management

Considering an Asset Performance Management Initiative? 3 considerations as you map your journey.

Unexpected equipment failures can have many impacts to industrial organizations such as production downtime, increased repair costs and enhanced risks to worker safety or our environment.  An analysis by FM Global, one of the world’s largest commercial property insurers, determined that equipment failures were responsible for nearly 1/3 of all property related losses in 2018.  Over the last 15 years, a category of solutions named Asset Performance Management (APM), has evolved to help organizations combat equipment failures through proactive management of maintenance and inspection activities as well as ongoing assessment of equipment condition.  If you are on a journey to implement APM approaches, here are 3 considerations which should be considered to ensure you receive the potential benefits that comes with the reduction of equipment breakdown.

#1: Traditional Asset Performance Management (APM) is too hard.

APM requires a systematic method to integrate people, processes, and technologies and for many this represents a significant change in how engineering, maintenance and operations work day to day.  Due to this complexity, there has been a traditional view that APM projects needed to be treated as enterprise-wide, ‘big bang” endeavors with multi-year implementation projects and many solutions have been designed and are offered to reinforce this implementation model.  While this approach may be useful for the largest and most complex industrial organizations, many do not have a need to roll out APM practices across the entire asset base and can receive most of the value from reducing equipment breakdown on a small population of key equipment.  With the rise of modern, best of breed, APM solutions, it is now possible to apply best practices on a small set of equipment and grow the implementation as needed on your terms.  Use of purpose built and modern APM applications can ease change management to the organization, lower implementation risk and most importantly allow you to ensure alignment of scope and ROI to your specific business needs.

#2: The Asset Strategy is (still) the key value driver.

Over the last few years, a lot of the buzz and energy in the APM space has focused on emerging computing technologies, increased use of various mathematical algorithms, and 3D visualizations all of which offer the ability to enhance asset performance.  While all of these elements can provide incremental capabilities in your IoT asset management journey, the reality is APM success lies in the ability to centrally define, manage and implement asset strategies for your key equipment.  Simply put asset strategies are definitions on how an asset can fail and how you can prevent or minimize those failure impacts.  With an asset strategy as the foundation, you establish the blueprint to drive your maintenance plans, establish your monitoring activities and guide your prediction algorithms to drive out unexpected failures.  The key is establishing your program with ‘engineering pragmatism’ and ensuring your asset strategies are defined and operational before moving on to the secondary enhancements.  Once the asset strategies are established, your efforts with advanced APM techniques such as machine learning for anomaly detection or interactive 3D models will be much more effective.

#3: Enable the Equipment Experts.

One of the most single important factors in APM initiative sustainment is ensuring that equipment and operations experts are fully enabled by the process and technology supporting the initiative.  As noted in consideration #2, an asset strategy is effectively domain expertise curated in a structured manner and process that can be scaled across asset populations to drive reliability improvements.  The domain experts must have a simple and effective solution which not only allows them to define and implement asset strategies but also enables them to easily optimize as learnings from actual success and failures are experienced with the operation of the equipment.  Ensuring your APM solution offers simplicity in design, ease of use and accessibility from anywhere in addition to structured processes to foster collaboration and capture documentation of learnings have become essential to driving a sustainable and continually improving APM program.

The original article was first published here.

 

About the Author

This article was written by Joe Nichols. Prior to forming Itus Digital, Joe was the COO, VP Product Strategy at GE Digital, where he oversaw strategic growth planning, managed the software portfolio strategy, and ran key functions including Product Marketing, Business Unit Digital Solution Management, and Business Operations. Prior to GE Digital, Joe spent 21 years at Meridium focused on leading the product strategy and go-to market initiatives for 4 generations of Asset Performance Management solutions adopted by world-class industrial organizations.