Using Comparative Analytics to Implement Intelligent Asset Strategies

Have you ever wondered how you can leverage new technologies to improve the visibility of your assets?

I’ll discuss how to get more insights about the health and condition of your assets and how this can help you to ensure on-time product production, cost improvement, equipment reliability, plant safety and product quality.

GE Digital provides solutions to implement a comprehensive Asset Performance Management initiative that can deliver instant visibility into operational data, while supplying organizations with the insights to drive safer, more informed, and more profitable decisions about how to manage the maintenance strategies of their assets.

Below we summarize in three steps how GE Digital solutions can help you ensure that your assets reach their maximum potential.

Data is at the center of a digital initiative and data quality issues can slow APM implementation projects. Asset Answers from GE Digital can support organizations to improve the quality of the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) data.

Asset Answers with its embedded Data Quality functionality can help you to assesses the quality and completeness of maintenance work history data from the CMMS, identifying key areas within the data that need to be improved or completed to accurately benchmark maintenance and reliability performance. Visualization of and understanding the impact of missing data motivates users to drive improvement. In Figure 1 below, we see the results of an Asset Answers data quality analysis and the identification of 3 areas of improvement and the recommended actions for improvement.

Standardization of data allows the Reliability Engineer to spend more time identifying real issues than processing the data and trying to distinguish a real issue from what is simply bad data.

Figure 2 shows how the Peer Analysis feature of Asset Answers can help organizations quickly identify where they are under performing and just as importantly leading their peers in key asset management areas.

Using these and other Asset Answers insights, Reliability Engineers can drill down by taxonomy or by corporate structure to identify assets or assets type that have the most potential for enabling improvements.

A bad actor program is designed to identify assets that are not performing to design or expected capabilities and where improvements can lead to significant return on investment. Asset Answers Bad Actor Finding module provides a mechanism to prioritize bad actors, helping you to address assets with highest savings potential and focus the effort to reduce the risks on the most effective improvements.

Figure 3 shows an example of a Bad Actor dashboard following a benchmark approach where the highest savings potential, relative to benchmark, comes first. This quantifies the potential benefits for Reliability Engineers. It represents the potential value of industry benchmarking.

A comparative approach quickly identifies maintenance and reliability activities that drive high business value. Asset Answer also utilizes advanced analytics to help you to identify potentially hidden bad actors that have the biggest opportunity for improvement and highest ROI. These assets are “hidden” due to data quality issues that obstruct or hide their true impact on the organization.

Once identified equipment of interest can then be analyzed for updates to their maintenance strategy.

GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management (APM) solution is designed to Optimize asset performance to increase reliability and availability, minimize costs and reduce operational risk. The solution connects disparate data sources and uses analytics and classic reliability engineering tools to turn data into actionable insights. APM can help you to respond following questions:

1. How critical is this asset?
2. What is the history of this asset, and what is its current health?
3. In what ways could this asset fail, how could I mitigate risk of failure, and what would it cost?
4. What would be the consequences of this asset’s failure on my business?
5. What action should be taken now, and what should be our overall strategy to optimize business objectives?

APM, in combination with benchmark analysis provided by Asset Answers, maximizes the productivity and safety of industrial assets with higher return on investments, mitigating risks throughout the enterprise associated with asset operation and maintenance, and optimizes asset-related cost. This is represented in the figure below.

Whether you struggle with equipment data aggregation and quality issues, higher-than-expected maintenance costs, or inconsistent reliability and availability metrics, GE Digital solutions provide the proven, repeatable, systematic, and secure approach to achieving your goals. Asset Answers provides the diagnostics, APM provides the cure.

Find out how GE Digital Solutions can drive optimized maintenance and operations in your organization through data quality improvements, comparative benchmarking, and risk mitigation.