A New Approach to Asset Performance Management (APM)
Evolving your asset strategy into a dynamic digital reality.
There is no better time for a new approach to asset performance management. Why?
The fundamental goal of asset performance management is improved operational performance and productivity. Overall, it serves the business purpose of mitigating risks, reducing costs, and maximizing margins. Most production and infrastructure assets have a life span of 25+ years. So, organizations need to make the best financial decision at every stage of an asset’s life. Leveraging asset performance management, you can accurately determine the maintenance cycle and necessary investment levels. As a result, you not only extend the asset’s useful lifetime but its end-of-life value.
An effective APM platform should translate your asset strategy from a written plan into a dynamic digital reality. It needs to include an optimized set of monitored conditions and specific maintenance actions. And a successful asset strategy must ensure that you stay in front of unplanned failures and maintenance costs. Toward that end, asset performance management centers on asset strategy, implementation, and ‘active’ management and governance.
How Asset Twins Boost Asset Performance Management
Placing Asset Twins at the core of an APM platform allows organizations to evolve their asset strategies and optimize them even further. As a digital, virtual representation, the asset twin includes:
- design characteristics,
- historical failure rates and costs,
- failure consequences to the business,
- expected mission time,
- and probability failure.
More importantly, it defines the key components for maintenance, reliability, production, and operations professionals to monitor asset performance in the context of its use. Going one step further, asset twins assess failure risk and proactively identify emerging threats.
Asset Failure Modes and Protections
Another advantage that a digital asset twin approach offers is accurately defining an asset’s failure modes. But the benefit doesn’t stop there. Maintenance, reliability, production, and operations professionals can mitigate failure risk by conducting preventative maintenance activities by having a line of sight into failure modes. Also, they can establish what operating conditions to monitor for each asset. With failure modes understood, your organization can take the next step of implementing asset protections. Properly protecting an asset means continually assessing its condition and operation. An effective APM platform provides condition protections by monitoring equipment health, state, and operational parameters.
Similarly, it affords activity protections by monitoring preventative maintenance and inspection activities. When the platform detects emerging threats, it can automatically trigger prescriptive actions. Then, you can deploy those actions armed with the confidence of dodging unexpected failures and their associated negative impact.
Understanding the Differences Between APM Approaches
Marketing hype versus the reality
Today many APM solution providers implement different strategies for asset health monitoring and predicting asset health failures, including collecting and centralizing asset health data. Some lock their customers into a single supplier or technology for data capture, consolidation, and analysis.
At the same time, others focus on just one or two asset classes and approaches such as rotating assets or vibration monitoring. An effective APM approach needs to encompass many asset classes and the appropriate monitoring methods. Simultaneously, it must remain open, flexible, and scalable across different and numerous data sources.
Further, some take the path of decoupling their analytics implementation from the data strategy and directly connect to sensors. Others choose the traditional route of connecting to process historians and enterprise systems to enable scalability and holistic asset health monitoring.
But there are drawbacks to these approaches; mainly, they have a historian missing some condition monitoring data. Comprehensive asset health monitoring requires complete condition monitoring data to be accurate.
Finally, predicting asset failures as early as possible is good, but layering predictive with preventative maintenance is an even better approach. Many predictive maintenance and industrial automation providers employ a combination of statistical methods, artificial intelligence, and machine learning techniques. But the simple fact is that most professionals know and understand most asset failure modes. So, although artificial intelligence and machine learning seem nice to have, they are not necessary.
The Itus Digital Approach
A seamless business process to manage and govern the asset strategy lifecycle.
The Itus Digital process is practical and effective. We believe that industry experience combined with a practical business process is critical in developing and maintaining a successful asset strategy. Further, the real goal is actively managing asset strategies over the equipment’s lifecycle.
Our method guides you through the design, implementation, and management of asset strategies, including digital asset twins. We know that the asset twin must be accessible across the organization and for the asset’s entire life span. Further, we believe what can’t or doesn’t get measured doesn’t get improved. That is why we designed our process to enable maintenance, reliability, and operations professionals to easily measure their APM program’s effectiveness. By helping you drive a continuous asset optimization cycle, our model provides increased equipment reliability while lowering operating costs.
Overall, with our approach, you can balance maintenance activities and asset lifecycles within budget constraints. The result is a dramatic drop in unexpected and costly failures and asset downtime. There is no better time for a new approach to asset performance management.
ASSESS
RISK
RISK
Identify high-risk assets that can benefit from Asset Twins. Assess dominant failure modes to managed and ensure your business mission is met.
PROTECT
ASSET
ASSET
Apply Asset Twin Protections to monitor conditions and activities, identify emerging failure risks and drive prescriptive action.
MONITOR
TWIN
TWIN
Use real-time indicators, health scoring, and excursion logging to analyze current asset state and detect emerging threats.
ACT ON
THREATS
THREATS
Act upon proactive advisories and insights from asset twins. Mitigate failure risks and ensure continual strategy optimization.
Interested in learning more?
Consequently, there is no better time for a new approach to asset performance management. Give us 30 minutes and we will show you how integrated asset strategy and twin management can help you improve your Asset Performance Management.
Connect with us!