Asset performance management (APM) is a complicated undertaking.
Asset-intensive industries don’t just have one single asset to keep tabs on, they are managing a myriad of capital assets and often using several different systems (that provide insights regarding asset health, efficiency, reliability, utilization, and safety) to do it.
In order to leverage the real value of the data and algorithms and realize true digital transformation, companies must break down the silos that prevent a sophisticated APM strategy from taking root.
The breakdown of those systemic and organizational silos makes the right data accessible to the right people when and where they need it and the result is a comprehensive understanding of how assets are performing across an enterprise.
This is called collaborative asset intelligence, and it offers 5 key benefits for those who adopt it.
1. Increased productivity
Asset-intensive industries face a reality challenged by legacy systems and restrictive original equipment manufacturer service agreements.
At the same time, they are grappling with a loss of institutional knowledge as many experienced workers reach retirement age.
Advanced data analytics solutions can help keep up with these challenges. Yet having more data alone is not the answer. Collaborative asset intelligence corrals different sets of data in data analysis methodologies to aid lifecycle management, minimize total cost of ownership, and support intelligent maintenance strategies.
APM solutions can bring at-least a 10% reduction in asset running costs and help achieve CAPEX and working capital optimization.
2. Improved compliance
TAPM’s aggregated analysis and built-in machine learning mechanisms simplify day-to-day operations. This visibility into asset health and performance also supports greater regulatory compliance and its lean workflows and embedded reporting make inspection planning and compliance reporting easier.
Cybersecurity safety and compliance can also benefit. An anomaly in the APM data could indicate a data quality issue or perhaps a vulnerability in the system. Making APM data available to IT gives those responsible for securing mission critical assets an early warning system.
3. Proactive maintenance
With a high volume of data, key information and indicators can get easily lost.
When different data streams from varied assets and systems are known and understood, predictive maintenance systems can be deployed to overcome the data overload challenge. APM tools can detect anomalies before they turn into an actual malfunction. Based on sophisticated pattern recognition, similarity-based models and statistical inference, predictive analytics detect the earliest anomalies presently impacting critical assets.
One of Europe’s largest producers of electricity and heat, a market leader in both onshore and offshore wind power generation, uses APM prognosis tools to anticipate wind turbine gearbox and main bearing defects more than six weeks prior to the events. With around 50 wind farms in operation across five countries, avoiding expensive failures with the APM flagging the need for corrective action offers real and quantifiable ROI.
4. Reduced maintenance costs
An APM strategy that draws on collaborative asset intelligence positions the asset-intensive organization to reduce risk of failure.
At the same time, the organization can be more intentional in scheduling downtime, having analyzed several hypothetical what-if scenarios to determine when is the best time to do maintenance.
With powerful APM analytics, decision makers might weigh whether it makes more sense to:
- Run an asset at full throttle until end-of-life is reached
- Reduce asset load so that it can make it to a scheduled maintenance
- Intervene early to improve the asset’s longevity and productivity in the long-term
- Better schedule downtime associated with maintenance during times of least demand on the asset
The better informed the decision, the greater likelihood of the organization being able to control costs. APM makes all this possible.
5. Enhanced reliability
A mining company doesn’t want to stop extracting minerals when the market prices are high any more than a railway wants to explain to its thousands of commuters why they can’t take their regular route home. Greater insight into overall asset performance and health supports improved reliability.
The APM software affords an organization the ability to gain a holistic view of its enterprise assets and how they interact, allowing a better understanding of trade-offs and impacts, through modeling of different possible scenarios. This leads to reduced downtime and enhanced reliability and utilization.
Power prognostic analysis
APM strategy decisions have long been made based on subjective opinion.
The experts onsite have trusted gut instincts and industry knowledge to plan costly preventative measures. These often inflexible maintenance plans are dictated by time. At 18 months or 10,000 hours, the asset is expected to need attention, so maintenance is planned almost exclusively around the calendar and/or usage.
Using APM that relies on collaborative asset intelligence takes advantage of the many data points available in a digitally transformed asset environment. Experts can use details from across systems to anticipate “what if.” Drawing on historical trends, insights into the assets, and simulated future scenarios, decision-makers can move to condition-based maintenance.
Manage Your Assets Better
Lumada APM helps you operate, analyze and optimize your asset strategies. Our team understands our customers’ asset management needs and manage over $4T of assets every day, minimizing risks across their network, enhancing operational and financial performance, and executing the right strategies for the future.
