How Asset Performance Management Software Enables Reliability in Any Asset-Intensive Industry

Leaders of asset-intensive organizations are being met with an ever-growing list of terms like “digital transformation,” “Metaverse,” and “generative AI.” However, in all the hype of emerging technology, ensuring you have a reliable operation and software stack is of utmost importance.  

As organizations begin to invest in new energy sources, or to optimize current ones, it is mission critical to perform while transforming. Across the globe, organizations are being met with increasing pressure to generate more reliable, affordable, and sustainable energy while meeting rigorous environmental impact expectations. Along with these new expectations, organizations are also dealing with more data than ever before—and even more options with how to best manage it.  

With seemingly endless requirements to meet, organizations often overlook their current assets as an area of investment and optimization. Historically, assets in the field at older sites may never have been embedded with software and are still running unmonitored or with limited intervention. Although they may still be highly functional, it is also imperative to ensure that the assets or sites are also reliable to help meet the slew of expectations listed above. But where do you start? 

When identifying areas of opportunity to increase the reliability of your organization, it might be hard to see the forest through the trees. This becomes even more difficult when attempting to align your organization on a common goal.  

As asset-intensive organizations continue to grapple with more change than ever before, it is likely that priorities that can help you to operate in a reliable way may conflict. These challenges will look different in each organization, across every industry and can differ based on organizational maturity. Although not an exhaustive list, let us take a look at a few challenges that your organization might face while attempting to increase asset reliability:  

1. Disparate data: Any asset-intensive organization ingests millions of data points per day, if not more. This data spans across IT data, OT data, Edge data, data from manual inputs, images and 3rd party data from other suppliers that is either managed in-house or externally. On top of this, it is likely that there are multiple instances of the data mentioned coming from various sites or locations—making it incredibly difficult to process. With so much data being collected some is likely to not be used to the best of its ability or correlated with other data sources. When this happens the reliability of an organization may be impacted due to the inability to synthesize each datapoint.  

2. Conflicting business priorities: As the energy transition continues to change how the world produces and distributes energy, there seems to be a never-ending list of priorities being added to the current requirements to maintain profitability, safety, and digitization. For asset intensive organizations, business priorities often are aligned with the data sources as mentioned above. With disparate data, parts of the business are tracking different KPIs and are responsible for their own outcomes with limited view on how it impacts the goals of the Board.  

3. Limited investment funds: With shifting business priorities, it is common that not every improvement can be made to create a more reliable operation. Energy executives are wary that investors are looking for organizations to continue capital discipline. For years, oil companies spent heavily to sustain all-out production, however during periods of market volatility and multiple oil price crashes, hundreds of oil companies went bankrupt, leaving a legacy of heightened spending restraint. Beyond this oil industry example, asset-intensive organizations of all kinds are being met with increased regulations that require set dollars to support, including the expensive addition of new energy sources or acquisition of other energy companies. As a result, investments for maintenance or maintenance-related software are decreasing to help balance appropriation of funds. 

    

4. Change Management: The problem facing many organizations is that  there have been previous efforts to implement changes to help increase overall reliability that have failed, stalled, or did not show the expected return. With parts of the business carrying their own KPIs and workloads, department heads face an internal battle for resources. To make a significant investment in technology it’s necessary to get buy in from senior leadership and to have a timeline for results.  

Improving reliability begins with software that can align your enterprise goals to the Operations & Maintenance of your assets and make it easier for your teams to collaborate efficiently and effectively. With the right Asset Performance Management (APM) software you can put in place:

• Digitized asset strategies: For organizations looking to optimize asset reliability, it can become frustrating dealing with solutions that are disparate and built in silos. For APM software to be effective, it requires functionality that allows users to monitor program success, adjust maintenance strategies, and show real return on the investments being made. By generating digital asset strategies, an organization can keep up with current work requirements while preparing for the future.  

• Pre-built workflows: Many organizations often have difficulty uncovering the root of their problems that impact reliability. These problems could be operational, asset, people, vendor, or software related. While looking for an Asset Performance Management solution it is of utmost important to choose an option that that can help solve identified problems and be flexible enough to solve for future ones. Leveraging pre-built workflows available with Asset Performance Management decreases the barrier to adoption, reduces the stress of APM implementation, and gives users the confidence that the new solution is supporting their work. 

• Policy creation: Although pre-built workflows are important, organizations also require the flexibility to configure software in a way that works best for them. Many solutions on the market are difficult to configure so that organizations become reliant on vendors to make the changes for them. In the market today, Asset Performance Management software is beginning to develop user friendly tools like no-code, citizen development, bring your own model and policy designer that can help bridge gaps in functionality. In order to increase reliability by effectively using software, a solution needs a blend of pre-built content and easy-to-create new policies that allow engineers to meet their goals.  

• Integrating with Mechanical Integrity programs: When asset-intensive organizations think about reliability and Asset Performance Management, they often only think of condition-based, time-based, or predictive maintenance. But other aspects of APM can support increased reliability, such as Mechanical Integrity and inspection programs. As organizations focus on maintenance data and activities being derived from Asset Performance Management, it is now a necessity to pull in asset integrity data for an expanded view of overall operational reliability. Taking this data into context gives the ability to have a single program that increases reliability along with decreasing risk while still maintaining other performance indicators. 

• Enabling mobility: After digitizing strategies and determining the required workflows to support reliability, organizations must extend that work to mobile applications. By providing the capability to work from any location, programs such as Asset Performance Management can become even more powerful. To avoid application dissonance, data silos and unstructured data, choosing an APM vendor that can activate mobile work from a single foundation makes reliability that much easier to achieve. Mobile applications for APM eliminates the need to handwrite notes in the field, carry large devices or worry about data quality. Being able to collect data offline or online while in the field closes the gap between the field and office due to allowing data to be shared in near real time. The difference between logging handwritten notes and taking notes digitally could mean avoidance of equipment downtime—which ultimately also decreases overall risk profile.  

View our interactive Asset Performance Management demo that follows an organization solving asset problems, impacting asset reliability.