How Asset Performance Management Puts an End to Reactive Maintenance

It’s time to put an end to reactive maintenance management once and for all.

Some businesses have been making do and getting by with asset management strategies that sell them short, driving up the cost of maintenance labor and materials and increasing the risk that critical assets will be offline when they’re most urgently needed. The scene has been shifting over the past several years, with Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) offering greater visibility and sophistication for maintenance operations.

But business rarely sits still for very long. And with the rapid rise of Industry 4.0, it’s essential for asset management to keep up. Maintenance 4.0 is the set of tools and strategies that is helping companies optimize operations by deploying the mountains of data now available to keep equipment and production lines in peak operating condition.

What’s new and why it matters

If you’ve already embraced EAM, you know how much your company can gain by upping its maintenance game. Once you have a system that can capture asset condition correctly and maintain an electronic system of record, it’s hard to imagine how you ever got by without it.

But for many companies, that’s just the start. With an avalanche of operating data from multiple sources, there are so many opportunities to take another step up into predictive and preventive maintenance. APM is the tool that allows you to make sense of the data, develop a more profound understanding of your assets, predict and prevent failures, improve failure management, improve budgeting and cost control—all without having to install, then try to manage and maintain multiple software operations.

The eBook notes that APM pulls in data that has traditionally been stored in an EAM system as well as data from a wide range of asset measurement solutions, then applies algorithms or Artificial Intelligence or machine learning models to enable decision support, predictive analytics, and what-if analysis. The result is improved analysis and greater automation to increase asset efficiency, manage asset reliability and sustainability, improve customer-centricity, and optimize total cost of ownership.

The five components of APM

• The asset registry gives managers visibility into asset inventories and risks, tracks metadata on each device, and monitors the device’s position in the larger system as well as its current condition.
• The work history consolidates work orders, closing codes, solution codes, and more into a comprehensive portrait of an asset’s life cycle and provides a foundation for predicting future failures.
• Real-time condition data is readily available through a complex web of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors and instrumentation. An APM system makes sense of the continuing cascade of incoming data on individual devices, parts, and components, triggering alerts and work orders when pre-set tolerance limits are exceeded.
• Algorithms and modeling analytics turn data into action, allowing organizations to predict how assets will behave in real time and use Artificial Intelligence or machine models to perform what-if analysis.
• Connectivity between an APM solution and other elements of a corporate ERP adds depth and texture to APM plans while driving actions beyond the realm of maintenance and asset management.