Many organizations have set out a robust strategy for their enterprise asset management but have found it difficult to meet the expectations of it. This can often be traced back to a lack of visibility and the existence of disconnected silos of information across an enterprise. What information does manage to be shared has aged by the time it is acted upon which naturally lends an organization to take a reactive stance when it comes to decision making. This leads to missed opportunities and a reduction in overall efficiency.
Leading enterprise asset management companies create a competitive advantage by simply changing their mindset to becoming proactive with their decision-making. This drives change within an organization and puts the emphasis on the business outcome and how do we accomplish it. Naturally as challenges to the business outcome are addressed, the loop begins to close and interoperability between siloed data begins to materialize.
When you effectively integrate your maintenance processes across strategy, planning and execution, you can lower costs and drive better margins. The expectation is no longer just to drive operational efficiencies but to simultaneously address prominent boardroom topics such as sustainability, becoming net zero and carbon neutrality.
Closing the loop at an enterprise scale means you need to realize business process integration across your asset management, enterprise and stakeholder network. You want to achieve this connectiveness to deliver operational excellence, revolutionize asset performance and create a level of collaboration with your business partners whilst taking advantage of this enhanced connectivity and visibility to achieve sustainable operations in line with corporate ESG policies.
Delivering operational excellence has always been the primary objective of maintenance organization and the traditional domain of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). With a CMMS decision-making is insular and limited to the maintenance and operations personal that use these systems. It has always been a complicated and arduous task to develop and maintain integrations linking maintenance activities to other areas of the business such as finance and procurement.
By closing the loop and integrating maintenance across the supply chain with an enterprise asset management system (EAM)the total lifecycle management of an asset, from capital planning, procurement, installation, performance, maintenance, compliance, risk management, through to asset disposal is addressed.
With such a broad base of capabilities, decision-making extends beyond the maintenance and operations teams to include senior leadership and C-suite personnel. An EAM system allows asset-intensive industries to manage the lifecycle of an asset in its entirety.
To revolutionize asset performance an organization needs to shift from static, reactive methods to a more dynamic and prescriptive approach. Where the asset owners are empowered to make fast, more accurate maintenance decisions through the use of risk, criticality and reliability management. This actively reduces downtime and risk of failure by creating recommendations seamlessly integrated into your maintenance solution.
In order to make the recommendations, assets must be digitally connected through IoT sensors and regularly monitored to determine their current health and track overall performance over time. As time series data is collected machine learning models can be taught and using advanced analytics risk of failures can be predicted and proposed mitigating maintenance actions can be delivered.
By creating a common digital thread for equipment lifecycle management, configuration history and the operational data captured in the field can be fed back into product engineering to enable continuous improved of the design.
By closing the loop on asset performance management an organization achieves value by finding the balance between the performance of each asset, the cost of that performance and the exposure to risk it brings. Consequently, the maintenance spend can be reduced while lowering risk and increasing asset availability through the use of data science and predicting failures and implementing corrective actions early.
As the maturity of understanding increases within the maintenance and repair operations the prospect of collaborating digitally with external partners become a necessity in order to achieve resiliency and transparency across the asset lifecycle.
Organizations are facing challenges collaborating with the many external parties involved in operating and servicing their assets. Incomplete details and working off inconsistent asset history with missing parts information are the norm. A business network brings together the asset manufacturer, operator, and service provider in one centralized collaborative platform providing seamless collaboration and shared insights on maintenance activities.
Each asset stakeholders have specific goals and requirements. Asset operators want to minimize capital investments and operational overhead whilst maximize operational effectiveness. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) want to increase revenue growth and sharpen competitive advantage with bundled products and services. And service providers want to offer value-added services enabled by technological innovations. Each of these groups can benefit from a unified, collaborative network model.
A unified business network delivers real-time information on asset operator demand data, supplier details, asset maintenance history and contingent workforce availability to name a few. It helps bring intelligence into the entire supply chain, so companies can continuously improve processes end to end, reduce information and knowledge latency, predict outcomes, and offer differentiated services to customers – all while generating new revenue streams and developing new ways to be a disruptive force in the marketplace.
By closing the loop on collaboration all operators, service providers and OEMs benefit from lower asset management overheads, improved communication, greater equipment availability, and increased visibility into planning and scheduling windows.
In summary, each closed loop brings incremental value to an organization and an elevated level of maturity for their EAM strategy. It’s now up to you work out what is the next step in closing the loop between strategy and execution.
