OK, so I borrowed the title from a video presentation by Ronald de Kok of the company Maxgrip, but in a sea of jargon it nicely captures the transformation that is taking place across the asset management arena. It also serves to help me highlight AVEVA’s growing portfolio of asset management solutions which we can provide to our customers, following their recent acquisition of the software business of Maxgrip. This latest acquisition supports the view from Industry analysts that AVEVA now has one of the broadest ‘best of breed’ asset management solution sets in the industry
You may not be too surprised to learn that digitalisation is the enabler and driver behind this market disruption. It’s helping to unlock the potential of assets and empowering the adoption of predictive maintenance strategies across mainstream manufacturing, not just asset intensive industries (e.g. infrastructure and petrochemicals) where such practices are already gainfully employed. The ‘assets are talking’ because of the availability of low-cost sensors, connected via the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and enabling ever-increasing cost-efficient gathering of asset condition and performance data. Put in financial terms, the return on investment (ROI) for implementing asset management strategies now ‘stacks-up’ in industries such as food and beverage. We are already seeing examples of customers enjoying the benefits of increased asset availability, higher efficiency, along with significant cost reductions.
You may have also noticed terms such as Maintenance 4.0 and Asset Performance Management 4.0 (APM 4.0) starting to appear from industry analysts and product vendors. We think there’s still some way to go for these terms to be widely acknowledged but being comparable to Industry 4.0 they are another useful reminder of the influence of digitalisation.
One point I would like to stress is that the most reliable plants are not always the most profitable. It’s all about finding the correct balance of maintenance effort, you will hear this referred to as a ‘risk-based’ approach.
The graphic illustrates this balance between maintenance spend and the costs associated with non-availability of assets. This is, of course, entirely consistent with our established approach to high availability industrial IT solutions with which most of you will already be familiar.
Looking in more detail as to what this means from maintenance practices, the ‘Maintenance Maturity Pyramid’ illustrates a potential journey from a run-to-failure approach to a truly risk-based maintenance strategy – again we are not advocating that ‘higher is always better’ and the overall asset management strategy should be tailored to the specific needs, business context and company objectives.
I’ve already referred to AVEVA’s growing portfolio of asset management products and services, and at first glance the range can appear rather daunting, but they can be conveniently divided across four categories and I will delve deeper into each one over the coming weeks.
There is a wealth of information being generated as a result of the growing focus on asset management. In the ‘classic SolutionsPT way’ we aim to support our customers by helping to navigate through these materials and a great starting point would be to watch the previously referred to video by Ronald de Kok to hear first-hand why we should listen to the assets!
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