What is Asset Performance Management?

Introduction

As a definition, Asset Performance Management (APM) encompasses the capabilities of data capture, integration, visualization, and analytics tied together for the explicit purpose of improving the reliability and availability of physical assets. This implies APM includes the concepts of condition monitoring, predictive forecasting, and reliability-cantered maintenance (RCM).

When it comes to APM, I like to look at five components that allow organisations to extend the useful life of assets. They are Visualise, Monitor, Predict, Analyse and finally having a optimised Maintenance Strategy.  All these components combined, can assist in extending the useful life of the asset, increasing uptime and reducing costs. These costs cost’ are associated with unplanned maintenance, spare parts, decommissioning, acquisition, and commissioning of assets.

With a plethora of data available from sensors, multiple data points, and repositories holding data, I thought that visualization would be a good place to start.

Visualize

One of the most important things to visualize data is being able to integrate all the disparate data sources into one system.  Once this is achieved, by utilizing this data organizations can visualize asset performance. Organizations can gain an overall picture of how an asset is performing not only at a point in time but historically.  In addition to assessing the performance of one asset, visualization assists in benchmarking a fleet of assets.  Through benchmarking organizations can assess high and low-performing sites and drill down to identify potential causes for differences in asset performance.

Monitor

Monitoring of assets can occur in many ways.  The use of sensors to monitor variables like temperature, vibration, pressure the list goes on.  Condition monitoring via multiple methods, including visual inspections and the use of AI and Machine Learning to ascertain and rank the physical condition of an asset.  Monitoring, trending and overlaying each of these readings assist with the early detection of issues with an asset. This in turn reduces maintenance costs and identifies potential failures before they occur resulting in reduced downtime.

Predict

When using predict, Asset Managers and Reliability Engineers now can make an educated assessment as to the future performance of the asset. Then they can implement measures to reduce the risk of failures before they negatively impact asset performance.

The process of predict uses AI, Machine learning technology and probability to identify points of failure. The inputs are both historical and real-time asset performance records. Predict comes into its own, as many asset failures occur outside of scheduled maintenance windows.

Analyze

Now that we have all the data and we can visualize the performance of our assets, it is time to analyze the Asset’s performance. There are many methods to analyzing the data. However, importance needs to be placed on weighting each of the data sets and their impact on asset performance.  Many organizations do this manually and rely on subjective opinions to assign a performance rating.  Unfortunately, this is subjective as it relies on humans to make the decision! If I asked 5 people to score the performance or condition of an asset, I would often get 5 quite different responses and reasons for that score.  Through the utilization of APM systems and the algorithms behind them, organizations will gain a consistent view of asset performance.

Maintenance Strategy Optimization (MSO)

Maintenance Strategy Optimization is a process of defining what are the optimal activities and schedule frequency to optimize asset availability and performance without over servicing.  It is a proactive approach to reducing unwanted asset failures.  It is key to ensuring that your asset strategy stays in line with business and operational goals. There are many factors that can be involved in this process, and they include:

• Repair / Replace: when developing your MSO, it is important to understand the ROI and additional life span on repairing the asset versus replacing it. These calculations can be over the short or the long term and will be different for every asset and organization based on your risk profile.
• Risk Profiles: understanding and defining the businesses risk profile allow organizations to clearly identify critical assets and systems. Organizations should rate each asset on its risk to the operations of the business and maintain accordingly, taking asset criticality and available resources into account
• Reliability Centred Maintenance: is a process that ensures maintenance tasks are performed in an efficient, cost-effective, reliable, and safe manner. Maintenance tasks may be preventive, predictive, or involve inspections to identify or monitor non-critical risks.

APM Conclusion

Maintenance follows the 80:20 rule, 80% of your pain comes from 20% of the asset fleet your starting point is no need to apply APM to everything, just to the ones that matter.

Each one of these components will provide valuable insights into the performance of your important  assets. By combining the components, organizations will have a comprehensive overview of asset performance allowing you to make more informed decisions about Asset Performance Management and the impacts it has on operations and achievement of business and financial goals.

To assist in your APM journey, BPD have launched LoveYourAsset.  LoveYourAsset has been designed to assist in taking out some of the guesswork associated with APM.  Easy to use and pre-configured, we can assist you in realizing your APM goals. Learn more about LoveYourAsset here.

Finally, to learn more about Asset Performance Management and what BPD Zenith can offer you, contact us at: https://www.bpdzenith.com/emea/contact