How to connect your data and harness unrealized opportunity
One of the key benefits of an integrated approach to Asset Performance Management (APM) is that it unlocks a wealth of actionable insights. With these insights, you can anticipate outcomes, evaluate scenarios, and strategically choose proactive actions to better balance cost, risk, and performance.
Harnessing this opportunity involves connecting systems and data in a way that creates knowledge and drives action. Here are some tips to help you get started.
Consider the relationship between your systems and data
Implementing an integrated approach to APM involves establishing a digital thread that connects systems and data in a way that creates greater knowledge and insight. In doing this, it’s important to understand the relationship between systems and data and know which create content vs. which consume it.
There’s often misunderstanding around enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. ERP systems only house and consume data. They do not create or evolve it. The issue with this is that operating environments and organizational priorities change and the content housed by ERPs must adapt accordingly. For example, an increase in production may require particular assets to be serviced more often. Additionally, a change in capital budgets may require certain activities to extend asset life.
When thinking about how to connect your systems and data, think about how you can do so in a way that evolves your content and also uses that content to drive action in an evergreen way.
Establish clarity on the master of content
ERPs commonly serve as the system of record for assets and materials. However, you must identify what systems should be the master of different content in your organization.
In general, work execution management systems may house maintenance plan master data but they should not own it. Asset Strategy Management (ASM) systems should own the asset strategy and Asset Health Management Systems (AHM) should own the diagnostics.
Don’t recreate the wheel
It is important to remember that you don’t need to recreate the wheel. If you don’t have the content you need, go out and get it. Using generic content and failure mode libraries not only allows you to save time, but to learn from others in the industry. However, the content will need to be structured for your organization and aligned to your operations, your systems and data standards. This is where knowledge management can help put you in a position of competitive advantage.
Determine the level to consolidate
When organizations have hundreds of thousands or even millions of assets that is a lot of content to manage. You need to determine how best to consolidate and whether to do this at an asset or component level.
Consolidating content at a component level makes things more manageable. However, don’t think about this in terms of a library structure. Think about a more sophisticated model that contains all the intelligence available for each component, including variations based on factors like asset criticality.
Think plantwide
It is natural for any large industrial operator to have a spectrum of technology vendors potentially catering to the same domain, such as Asset Health Management and Condition Monitoring, but supporting different asset classes. It is important to evaluate the operational relationship between critical, essential, and balance of plant assets and correlate the data captured for their health assessment to reveal insights as to the cause-and-effect relationships that may be driving current or potential health issues.
In this context, it is important to consider how to bring plant-wide systems together to enable a single version of the truth. Once this is achieved, data from across operational facilities and plants can be aggregated to allow for benchmarking and comparative analytics to enable continuous improvement across the enterprise.