What Does Excellent Asset Management Look Like?

Companies are digitising their operations using the latest generation of Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions. APM allows operators to automatically monitor plant and equipment, increasing equipment reliability and reducing maintenance costs.

Operators are also facing a brain drain. Equipment engineers and maintenance experts are increasingly attracted to companies in renewables and other emerging sectors.

To ensure that they are getting the most from their APM solutions, knowing what excellent asset management looks like is essential to a business

The latest APM technology supports the five core capabilities of modern Asset Performance Management

Zero paper operations

Resilient organisations are rapidly reducing and removing paper and manual processes from their operations as fast as possible. Removing errors and inefficiencies are obvious benefits, as is the drive to reduce unnecessary physical interaction in the current pandemic.

Organisations cannot begin the journey to fully automated operations if data is buried in paper records. Equipment telematics data is not enough. You need to blend telematics with operational data such as customer orders, equipment availability, logistics movements and equipment service history and status

Artificial Intelligence support

From expert rules systems to complex black-box neural networks, AI is increasingly being deployed to support everyday tasks. Equipment rental companies are using expert rules to trigger equipment billing based on telematics data. Oil & Gas Operators are using machine learning algorithms to monitor and predict faults in complex offshore equipment.

Easy-to-use analytics

Managing lots of data can seem overwhelming, and that is why the industrial companies that are great at digital innovation put the end-user first. A remote maintenance expert faced with the decision to shut down a mission-critical generator on a construction site needs decision support tools that are easy to use and understand.

Actionable insight

When an expert decides to intervene with a mission-critical item of plant, there must be a seamless process to collaborate with other team members to take the right action. Insight without action is of limited value, which is why the latest generation of APM solutions ship with a range of mobile apps for field workers to quickly execute work and capture stranded data that can’t be streamed from telematics.

Access from anywhere, in real-time

And finally, the technology must be available to anyone in the organisation at any time, and the data it uses must be real-time. The new normal assumes seamless access to information in the cloud and tools that allow decision-makers to collaborate using the latest data sets, 24*7*365. The latest generation of APM solutions also includes open interfaces and pre-built connectors to the common back-office systems prevalent in asset-centric companies.

This blog is an excerpt from our “Guide to Asset Performance Management for Equipment Rental”.

Download the complete guide for more insights, such as “A New Way of Managing Assets?”.