Across all industries, organizations make significant investments in assets. Whether they’re being used to manufacture sweets, move thousands of passengers from point A to B or provide hospital facilities for patients, Asset Performance Management (APM) is an approach that ensures those assets are providing the best return on investment while ensuring the correct balance of risk and maintenance cost is preserved.
Although Asset Performance Management has been around for decades, the technology continues to evolve in line with the readiness of customer processes and data to exploit it. This blog will discuss what capabilities IFS is delivering to support Asset Performance Management. We will summarize our view of an APM maturity curve with analysis of data acquired through customer feedback as to where they are and where they want to get to on their APM journey.
What is Asset Performance Management (APM)?
Asset Performance Management (APM) brings together data from assets with industry methodologies and uses algorithms and software solutions to assess how assets are performing then prioritize and deliver maintenance activities based on company-defined goals for asset availability (such as uptime) and reliability such as mean-time-between-failure.
Conceptually, APM is comprised of several elements including (but not limited to) monitoring assets, identifying, and actioning anomalies, providing a view of the overall health of assets, event forecasting and survivability analysis. The evolving maturity and capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be applied to APM to assist with data identification, decision making and automation. For example, AI could be used to assist with data mapping from a variety of data sources into IFS Cloud to reduce the manual mapping effort or it could be used to automate Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) processes allowing for more analysis to be carried out across a broad spectrum of assets.
APM leverages good quality data to make – high-confidence recommendations and next steps, which may result in manual or automated changes to maintenance strategies for specific assets or classes of assets, informed repair vs replace decisions or input for future product development.
Benefits and Potential Value of APM
The benefits of getting Asset Performance Management right are potentially significant, and although there is a great deal of variation between industries, regions and relative maturity, some key benefits are:
Figures from IFS customers reported on Business Value Assessments and case studies.
APM Maturity
As organizations make greater use of enterprise asset management, Internet of Things, and other adjacent technologies, their capability and capacity to move along their APM journey increase. However, it should not be assumed that all organizations want or need to adopt artificial intelligence or machine learning.
Recently IFS presented the EAM maturity model shown below to a broad cross-section of organizations to garner their feedback on where they are today and where they want to be in the next 5 years although some desire to get to AI-driven prescriptive maintenance, the majority will be satisfied by predictive, condition and usage-based.
IFS’s Approach to APM
At IFS, we have been on the APM journey with our customers for several years and have provided capabilities that have supported organizations with the move from calendar-based to condition-based maintenance, delivering structured failure management to influence maintenance decisions, capturing IoT / sensor data, and monitoring how assets are performing to provide asset insights. We also identify anomalies which might indicate potential trouble ahead as customers adopt predictive maintenance. IFS continues to extend its APM capabilities and is looking further into how to apply artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to help customers who run some of the world’s most complex assets and solve some of the most challenging problems.
Asset Performance Management is a journey with the potential to deliver great benefits to those companies that not only adopt the supporting technologies but also make changes to the support processes, data, education, and training. IFS is on that journey with our customers, listening to their requests and delivering products which enable organizations to maximize their asset return on investment.
To learn more about our Enterprise Asset and Asset Performance Management solutions, please take a look at the website and get in touch to speak to us.
