The digital world has arrived. Forty-eight percent of organizations are now digital, having moved from the act of digitally transforming organizations to operating a digital business. This means running a business at scale and transferring much of the people resource to technology. Today, technology plays a more significant role, as organizations seek to leverage as many advantages as possible. In the past, employees were more involved in the operation and maintenance of enterprise assets. But with digital transformation, technology has taken on much of this work, with 24/7 oversight, alerts, and automated workflows.
Managing the enterprise assets has been a full-time job for many individuals over the years, but with digital transformation, innovation has brought change to the monitoring and maintenance of systems, with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, computer vision/remote visual inspection, and even AI/Industrial voice interfaces to help see and respond to issues faster.
All these innovations, when integrated or embedded in modern cloud-based enterprise asset management (EAM) technologies, can help an organization scale and address all segments of the asset life cycle, from initial design through to build, commission, operate and maintain, optimize, and decommission — ensuring each asset’s availability across its entire life cycle.
Real-Time Sensing Responds and Identifies Next Steps
In the digital world, asset resilience requires a focus on real-time oversight and data with, responsive maintenance and workflows that identify and resolve anomalies before the business is impacted. This is underscored with modern cloud-based innovative EAM technologies that can help manage your assets, including asset inventory, helping to set acceptable levels of service, and providing a lens to manage and calculate life-cycle costs.
With this level of monitoring, maintenance, and asset portfolio overview, the organization can achieve its planned productivity gains and operational efficiencies with greater visibility and control. Some organizations use EAM systems to track production supplies and purchases, while others use it to balance operational requirements against maintenance needs, finding the right time to perform regularly scheduled maintenance activities against production schedules, which increases peak performance runtime and asset availability. These examples automate more workflows, increase operating efficiencies, curtail human errors, and reduce unplanned downtime and outages.
In addition, EAM technologies support sustainability objectives because the assets and data are connected across the enterprise, enabling more monitoring of the sustainability goals and compliance to the asset monitoring, even setting up red flag alerts to quickly remediate. In addition, when an asset has reached its end-of-life stage in the business, the organization can start to plan for newer equipment while selling the old asset with intact records and suggested monitoring and maintenance for the new buyer. The asset life cycle can then come full circle.
Asset Resilience Brings Real Economic Value
In today’s economic environment, managing and controlling spend is critical to profitability. Spending money on nonessential maintenance, buying new assets because they’ve begun their useful life, and even procuring extra maintenance inventory “just in case” existing equipment goes bad — all that eats away profitability. In the digital world, organizations should leverage EAM technology to the fullest so they can maximize their asset investment portfolios, account for the assets overall, bring insights into asset performance while monitoring for and scheduling preventive maintenance, and ensure the organization stays productive while optimizing asset utilization at peak performance.
EAM technologies deliver the following measurable benefits:
- Savings in maintenance costs and time with the tracking of assets
- Operational efficiencies resulting in longer runtimes
- Improved uptime of equipment with monitoring and maintenance
- Improved customer experience
These economic value-adds also reduce the angst within the business over asset performance and improve asset resiliency while providing greater transparency so course corrections happen immediately. Organizations can monitor and maintain asset performance regardless of economic conditions.
SOURCE: Mickey North Rizza (Apr 27, 2023). Optimize Performance and Lifecycles with Asset Resilience. IFS BLOG. https://blog.ifs.com/2023/04/optimize-performance-and-lifecycles-with-asset-resilience
