How Exposing and Understanding Risk Can Unlock Value

One of the most important things you can do to get ahead of risk is to identify and understand your potential points of failure and their likelihoods.

That’s not to suggest it’s an easy task. In large asset-intensive organizations, risk can come from many areas. It can be difficult to uncover and even more difficult to quantify. However, with an Integrated APM process, you can better prioritize your resources and get to a place where you can stop fighting fires and start to act on opportunity.

Better risk management starts with better data

Risk management is a never-ending challenge and there are difficult decisions and trade-offs to be made all the time. For example, let’s say you are monitoring thousands of critical assets. What happens if the alarm goes off for several assets at the same time? How do you decide what needs attention first?

Similarly, how do you prioritize maintenance work? We all know maintenance sometimes gets deferred, but how do you decide which activities you can let slip and which will create risk if not completed on time?

To manage risk more effectively, you need to make these decisions based on data and that means having full visibility of risks and the ability to quantify and rank them on a continuous basis.

Moving from chaos to order to realizing opportunity

The reality is most organizations lack a complete picture of their assets and an understanding of potential risk exposures. One of the reasons for this is the disconnected nature of traditional Asset Performance Management (APM) where key activities and the content they generate are quite siloed. 

So how can you move away from the chaos of trying to react to multiple alarms at once to managing risk in a more orderly fashion? Part of the solution comes from Integrated Asset Performance Management which connects the key functions of APM, including Asset Strategy Management (ASM), Asset Condition Monitoring (ACM), and work execution.

This connection provides a true, overarching visualization of asset health and risk, making it possible to quantify risks and identify those that should be tackled first. For example, if an alarm goes off, Integrated APM provides you with a direct line of sight into the strategy for that asset and Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis (FMECA) content. You can then prioritize your response to that alarm with an understanding of the failure and its impacts, including any disruption to production.

Ultimately, Integrated APM can help you leverage your data to tackle the most significant risks first. It can also provide you with a process to better address issues like degradation of equipment which cause unplanned downtime. And once you get on top of those issues, APM becomes less about managing risk and loss and more about increasing performance and realizing value and opportunity.  This is where a real competitive advantage is created, through the escalating value in the agile operations and maintenance alignment, productivity increases and an improving culture of reliability.

Download our Integrated APM Infographic to learn more about Integrated APM and how it can help you manage risk and improve performance