Asset Information Management is Vital to Optimize Asset Performance Management

​By Sharada Prahladrao and Rajabahadur V. Arcot

Process industries, such as cement, chemical & petrochemical, electric power, oil & gas, refining, and metals are highly capital asset intensive.  India, with a growing economy, will witness increasing investments in process industries, and therefore it is relevant for the captains of the industry to ensure the capital effectiveness of their investments and that such assets deliver optimal value throughout their lifecycle.  It is not only important to invest in appropriate plant assets but also in technologies that provide real-time asset information to all stakeholders.  In the case of capital-intensive process industries, the pursuit of operational excellence, which is important for the success of any company in today’s flat world, OpX is not realizable without asset performance management (APM) excellence. 

Asset information management (AIM) solutions are an integral part of every capital asset investment and companies need it to manage the use and care of physical assets.  AIM must be complete, comprehensive, accurate, and accessible to achieve optimum asset performance.  Despite its importance, few organizations have a proper strategy for managing this valuable resource. The cost of this is staggering, both in financial terms (1.5 percent of revenues each year) and increased risk of major incidents.  Poor asset information management (AIM) also increases the risk of safety, health and environmental incidents, which can jeopardize an enterprise’s sustainability. While the opportunity for improvement is incredible, many organizations continue to suffer the pains of poor AIM. Some do not recognize the opportunity; others understand that they have problems, but do not know how to solve them or find it difficult to provide the return on investment justification.  To assess the financial impact of poor AIM on asset performance, organizations need to consider three different areas – revenues, operating and maintenance costs (OpEx), and the capital costs of modifications and upgrades (CapEx). Poor AIM significantly impacts all three, and the effects are cumulative with respect to overall financial performance.

ARC defines AIM as a strategy responsible for supporting asset performance management (APM), spanning all activities and stakeholders involved in the operation and maintenance of the organization’s asset investments.  A good AIM strategy ensures that APM stakeholders can consistently and easily access all the information required for decision making.  Good AIM means that the organization’s information systems are complete, accurate, timely, consistent, secure, and accessible.  Organizations must treat AIM as an enterprise-wide program.  Asset information may be site-specific, but most of the information management challenges are common across all sites, so there are opportunities to leverage investments in people, processes, and technologies.  An enterprise approach to AIM also enables organizations to benchmark APM performance and practices across sites.

Asset Information – Expectations and Integration
Asset information has to support a diverse group of stakeholders with a wide range of interests.  Asset information must provide answers to numerous questions about the assets and their management and it calls for integrating information from many different categories so that the information is comprehensive and complete.  Stakeholders will also evaluate the information system on its ability to understand relationships between information and facilitate navigation to related information.

While these are reasonable expectations, the distributed nature of asset information leads organizations to employ a variety of content management applications.  These include document management (DMS), relational databases (RDB), engineering information management (EIM), master data management (MDM), and geospatial information systems (GIS).  Much of the asset information is scattered across a multitude of APM and enterprise software applications, individual desktop PCs, websites and hard copy files. 

Providing AIM work environments with access to all these applications can help users deal with this situation.  Integrating applications is also important, as it can enable stakeholders to access asset information directly from within their normal workflows.  But neither work environments nor integrating applications will be very useful unless people know what they are looking for or where to find it.  Therefore, an asset information data model is mandatory.  This needs to be adaptable to support a diverse set of information objects and a variety of relationships that capture key APM perspectives. 

Information quality is another issue that may seem familiar to IT groups.  For example, centralized information management is not tenable for asset information given the existing situation in most organizations.  In fact, leaving information management to individual groups is beneficial; it exploits each group’s self-interest in maintaining its own data.  An effective asset information strategy will establish appropriate governance policies that recognize these special characteristics.

Charting the AIM Roadmap
The predominance of technical information in AIM also means that the IT organization will have to add new, possibly unfamiliar, information formats to the list of supported data types.  This may also require custom extensions to the organization’s normal information management solutions and to the tools they provide users to view and analyze information.  Standards are also important in AIM.  However, the dominant standards in AIM will likely be new to the IT organization, so education and training in this area should be part of the AIM strategy.  Converting special formats to more generic forms, like pdf files, is one approach many organizations consider.  It enables use of existing solutions, but it may make change management more complicated.  Since good change management is fundamental to good AIM, this key decision must be made during AIM strategy development.

Most AIM programs cannot be implemented in one-step, so it is essential to have a clear roadmap, showing how AIM will be rolled out consistently to provide specific capabilities and benefits; and it will help to coordinate implementation efforts and monitor progress.  This also aids in planning IT investments and helps sustain support across the organization.  Industry differences in asset portfolios lead to different asset management practices and requirement of asset information.  Performing preventive maintenance on equipment may be the focus in a plant, but managing replacement and modifications will be the priority for infrastructure operators.  The use of third parties also varies by industry; oil companies may outsource all operations and maintenance tasks; manufacturing facilities might use third parties to handle specialized equipment, such as robots; and utilities may rely on local services to effect repairs. 

ARC believes that implementing AIM technology solutions can improve an organization’s performance in two ways: improving the quality of asset information and by improving the ability of asset management stakeholders to effectively use the asset information in their work and strengthen their decision making capacity.  These two issues are closely linked – good information has limited value unless people can use it and accessibility is helpful only when the information is of reliable quality.  The market for AIM is still nascent so the current landscape for AIM solutions is sparse and fragmented.  ARC’s research in this area reveals that this market holds a plethora of opportunities for solution providers who can give customers a comprehensive suite of solutions, which address their specific needs. 

All this and more will be discussed in-depth at the technical seminar on January 12, 2012 at Hotel Trident, Mumbai.  Dr. Sid Snitkin, ARC Advisory Group, with over three decades of experience, will talk about AIM solutions in his keynote address.

For more details about the technical seminar in Mumbai, please contact sharadap@arcweb.com/raja@arcweb.com.