How APM complements Enterprise Asset Management to maximize returns on your asset investments

The terms Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Asset Performance Management (APM) often appear together – and sometimes are even used interchangeably. Although EAM and APM are closely related, they differ on certain aspects including their primary goals and scopes. Let’s look at what the two solutions typically do and how they complement one another to ensure optimal asset performance and management.

An Enterprise Asset Management system or EAM focuses on comprehensive management of asset records throughout the asset lifecycle, i.e., from procurement to maintenance and disposal. Assets covered by EAM could include equipment, machinery, buildings, and infrastructure. EAM aims to improve assets’ performance, reduce associated maintenance & repairs costs, ensure assets’ compliance with regulations and standards, and extend their usable life. Some key capabilities of an EAM system include:

• Maintenance planning and scheduling: includes records of work orders, labor management, human resources, project management and maintenance plans
• Asset lifecycle management: includes data around asset status, warranty, disposal, etc.
• Supply chain management: includes inventory management, materials management, demand planning and procurement information
• Core EAM functions including analytics, asset registry, compliance, financials, etc.
• Monitoring: includes IoT, Operations Technology and Mobility information

On the other hand, an Asset Performance Management (APM) system or APM focuses on maximizing assets performance and reliability through proactive asset monitoring and interventions. Further, unlike EAM, APM’s primary focus is on the business-critical assets and not all assets available in an organization. This focus allows APM users to save costs associated with monitoring and maintenance of non-critical assets but keep any associated risks in control. Some of the key capabilities of an APM system include:

• Asset health monitoring: for visibility on assets’ current state and health
• Asset reliability & performance analytics: leverages different types of analytics to predict and address issues before they occur, including reliability analytics, root cause analysis (RCA), production loss analysis and more
• Asset strategy management: to reduce asset risk and optimize lifecycle cost by employing techniques like Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), strategy management, lifecycle cost analysis, etc.
• Asset integrity management: to keep facilities contained and compliant with compliance management, inspection management, risk-based inspection, and other approaches

As their capabilities show, APM and EAM are two different solutions or approaches with some commonalities. In fact, in an industrial set up, these solutions work in conjunction to bring complementary capabilities for optimizing an organization’s asset investments.

Integration between EAM and APM is crucial: A seamless transfer/integration of data that exists in EAM and APM is crucial to get the best out of these two systems. This is facilitated by EAM-specific interfaces and other tools. For instance, EAM data (on equipment, equipment locations, equipment failures, work history, etc.) can be transferred to GE Vernova’s APM system and subsequently processed and analyzed to determine the equipment state and locations, reliability, trends, potential risks, and probability of failures. EAM-specific interfaces for SAP, IBM, and Oracle are available to facilitate the process of transferring data between EAM system and GE’s APM system. Further, alternative EAM integration options are also available through APM Connect.

Let’s try to understand how these two systems work together to support asset management and performance optimization goals using below workflow:

Identifying critical assets, risks, and mitigation actions

• The very first step for an organization is to identify the assets which are critical for business operations. An APM solution could help to perform an Asset Criticality Analysis to identify the highest risk assets and systems based on their consequence of failure. This helps prioritize operations and maintenance expenditures by driving the appropriate asset strategies based on asset criticality.
   
• Identify risks and most effective mitigation actions for each of these assets using risk-based methodologies in APM such as Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Failure Mode & Effect Analysis (FMEA). This interactive demo shows how you can efficiently perform risk assessments for failure modes.

Defining and executing strategy

• Define asset strategy for monitoring, maintenance, and risk mitigation. This usually requires employing a combination of condition monitoring, inspections, engineering modifications, compliance actions and more approaches
   
• Execute strategy based on data and analytical capabilities available in APM and pulling in needed data/information from connected systems such as EAM which includes useful data like maintenance plans, work history, work schedules, etc.
   
• Initiate ongoing asset health monitoring and analysis – may use a combination of automated and manual data, processes, and approaches from different systems, including condition data, predictive analytics, maintenance and other data from EAM, process data from historians, and more.

Alerts, insights, and analytics

• Receive alerts around any real-time asset health issues and/or predicted asset failures.
   
• Different types of analysis available in APM (like Root Cause Analysis, Reliability Analysis, and others) could help to understand reason for alerts and underlying asset issues.
   
• Conduct deeper analysis combining EAM data including work history, previous recommendations and more, to address issues.

Execution and continuous improvement

• After identifying the issue(s), create recommendations in APM to address such issues in future. These recommendations in APM could automatically create and schedule work orders in EAM.
   
• Execute work based on recommendations and update asset strategy in APM if needed.
   
• Thus, APM and EAM work closely to drive a continuous improvement loop for asset management and performance.

Asset Performance Management and Enterprise Asset Management are complementary solutions, with APM focused on maximizing assets’ performance while the latter aimed at managing assets throughout their lifecycles. When these solutions work in tandem, they enable organizations to get the required insights and drive actions necessary to get maximum value out of their asset investments.

Learn more about how GE Vernova’s secure and scalable enterprise APM solutions can help you maximize asset performance, empower workforce, and deliver tangible ROI.