Itus Digital: The First Insight
In the Beginning
When you think about the history of asset performance, the famous quote, “You can’t know where you are going until you know where you have been,” Around 1965, the industry started CMMS (computerized maintenance management system). CMMS is software that centralizes maintenance information and facilitates the processes of maintenance operations. Then network technology advanced enough to give companies the ability to link computer systems across multiple sites. From this advancement arose EAM (enterprise asset management). EAM systems include maintenance management capabilities, but they consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a company’s physical assets. By the 1990s, EAM had begun evolving into APM (asset performance management).
The Rise of Asset Performance Management
In fact, in 1996, Meridium convened the first Asset Performance Management User Conference. This event brought together some of the brightest minds from the most progressive industrial companies in the world. The objective was to define how we could better protect people, the planet, and industrial profits with enterprise software solutions. At that time, we knew that we were working on some innovative approaches that would change the industry’s view of industrial asset management.
As a company, we understood that we were planting the initial seed that ultimately created a multi-billion-dollar enterprise software category. This category, named asset performance management, would enhance environmental sustainability, improve worker safety, and deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in value creation.
From a historical perspective, by the 1990s and 2000s, software developers and engineers designed classical, model-based, or statistical technologies primarily for anomaly detection. These solutions required expert human intervention to interpret results and separate real alerts from false alerts. Today, in the overall context of asset performance management, many organizations have the fundamentals in place. For example, many can catalog assets, plan and schedule asset maintenance. And most organizations have implemented basic monitoring and inspection programs to identify potential problems.
What Makes Asset Performance Management Valuable Today
But these solutions fall short. A key value driver for current APM platforms is to wrap these core processes with risk-based asset strategies. Further, using an asset twin approach of digital models proactively monitors and identifies risks to the business. We believe a platform that provides the capabilities to define asset strategies, model digital twins, and actively monitor risks is a crucial enabler for the next level of industrial asset optimization.
Today, we are announcing the launch of Itus Digital. We are a unique company of Asset Performance Management industry veterans. Our collective passion for protecting people, the planet, and profits is what drives our purpose. We envision a purpose-built asset performance management platform because of our years of experience with countless companies worldwide and across industries. We desire to see an APM strategy for every asset.
Read on to learn about us and our approach.