Asset Management Agility: Balancing complex priorities and demand volatility
In today’s industrial environment, everything is in a state of constant flux.
Assets age, market demands fluctuate, and the costs associated with asset downtime and repairs continue to rise. For organizations across industries—whether in transportation, mining, or manufacturing—the ability to adapt to these changes and adjust asset strategies in near real-time has become increasingly critical.
Failure to connect business strategy to asset strategy creates excess cost and risk
It is no secret that organizations need to be agile and quick to respond to changes in market conditions to be successful. In times of surging demand, they need to quickly find ways to increase productivity and production. In times when demand is slow and current stock levels high, they may need to slow down production and redeploy resources.
Organizations have become better and faster at reacting to change. However, many still struggle to ensure operational decisions and priorities are reflected in their asset strategies.
The inability to connect business strategy to asset strategy means that asset strategies and maintenance plans often remain static, irrespective of changes in demand or operating environment. What's more, maintenance plans are frequently time-based rather than based on an asset’s runtime or performance. In other words, maintenance tasks are completed in the same way, at the same time regardless of whether assets are being pushed to their limit or operating on a reduced schedule.
The bottom line is that assets are often either under-maintained, leading to risk of failure and unplanned downtime, or over-maintained, which can lead to wasted time and costs. The volatility of a rapidly changing market can further amplify these risks and costs.
Optimizing operations through improved asset strategy and risk management
Organizations need a more structured approach to aligning maintenance strategies with changing operational contexts. This requires a holistic view of asset risk, performance and cost. It also requires the application of machine learning and AI to anticipate outcomes, evaluate scenarios, and choose actions to optimize process and reduce risk and failure.
In times of demand volatility, a structured and data-driven approach to asset strategy management can help organizations more quickly adjust and optimize asset strategies based on production needs.
Accurate forecasting of cost and risk is critical to optimizing strategies based on demand. For example, organizations need to understand the cost of asset failure and unplanned downtime based on the current environment. In times of peak demand, these costs can be enormous in terms of lost productivity and opportunity. In times of low demand, these costs may be minimal and, in some circumstances, an organization may save money by not operating at all.
Similarly, organizations need to know how ramping up or down production impacts the risk of failure so they can adjust their strategies and maintenance plans accordingly.
All of this is logical, but for most organizations to make and execute these types of decisions quickly requires a step change in their approach to asset strategy management.
How Cordant™ can help
Effective management of asset strategies allows organizations to predict and reduce risk of failure, optimize costs and drive more value from existing assets. Cordant™ Asset Strategy can help by providing a structured approach to quickly building, deploying, and evolving asset strategies to keep pace with operational requirements.
Cordant™ Asset Strategy also provides a workflow engine to drive the review, approval, and implementation of strategy changes. This connection between strategy to work execution in the field is essential to optimizing operations and achieving true agility.
Baker Hughes also offers a range of services to help customers optimize their asset strategies and improve reliability. These include the development and review of asset strategies leveraging a Reliability Centered Maintenance methodology and a Failure Mode, Effect, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) based structure. We also support customers with the development of consistent and quality Master Data which is important for the efficient and effective building and execution of asset strategies.
In addition to these reliability consulting services, we work closely with customers to define a journey map increase the maturity of functions like asset strategy management, build and augment internal capability, and achieve faster, sustained value from our Cordant™ solutions.
To learn more, download our playbook on how to build, deploy, and sustain optimal maintenance strategies effortlessly.