Meridium Announces Next-Gen APM Platform

Summary
"Simply Connected" was the theme for the 2015 Meridium Conference held April 20-24 at the Hilton Bonnet Creek Hotel in Orlando, Florida. Nearly 500 attendees were treated to an insightful, informative, and entertaining week. Meridium took attendees "back to the future," complete with Doc Brown and the DeLorean time machine in a playful look from the future at how the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) changed how the world does business by applying analytics to the Big Data generated by millions of smart sensors, machines, and devices to optimize work processes and lower costs.

The conference marked the official launch of Meridium's next generation asset performance management (APM) platform, Meridium Enterprise APM V4. According to Meridium CEO Bonz Hart, the new platform is "the engine that will further drive the IIoT and provide real value to its adopters."

Key conference takeaways include:

• Access to data from internet-connected devices can deliver incremental business benefits and insight.
• Meridium Enterprise APM is a platform for creating and benchmarking asset strategies and managing intelligent assets.
• Platforms provide connectivity and the ability to use applications developed in the platform itself to turn raw data into information for efficient use by higher-level enterprise applications.

Intelligent Asset Strategies Require Connectivity
In his opening remarks, Meridium CEO Bonz Hart warmly welcomed conference attendees and expressed his appreciation to Meridium Enterprise APM users for their contribution to continually refining the company's software to help ensure it continues to deliver value. He acknowledged the integration challenge manufacturers continue to face and the role Meridium Enterprise APM can play in managing assets, IT, and business strategies.

Mr. Hart noted that the (IIoT) will require more than standalone solutions. It will require connecting disparate entities, storage capacity to warehouse exploding volumes of data, analytics, and content in context. At this point in the program, CTO, Eddie Amos, announced the official launch of Meridium Enterprise Asset Performance Management Version 4, which he characterized as the next generation of APM software.

Next-Generation APM Platform
Industrial companies have long pursued horizontal and vertical connectivity within their operations in the ongoing effort to minimize downtime, improve performance, and achieve operational excellence. Historically, sensors in industrial automation systems supported process/production control, safety, and regulatory compliance. Increasingly, intelligent sensor data is also being used to support operations management and maintenance activities to lower costs, optimize processes, and facilitate efficient execution.

The underlying value proposition of IIoT hinges upon improving the operational performance of manufacturing assets by retrieving data from smart sensors connected to information management systems, production management systems, and reliability systems. Currently, a majority of these systems remain islands of information, largely due to the lack of platforms to provide integration with higher level architectural components to maximize the business value of connected products. A strategic approach to asset management necessitates the convergence of plant automation (OT) and business systems (IT) to remove the remaining barriers to information visibility and collaboration as well as provide a unified approach to improving business performance. It also requires integrated workflows to optimize business processes, enhance decision making, reduce costs, and lower risks. As the aggregator of all asset performance data, the synchronized view of risk available in the V4 enables maximum cost effectiveness with reduced production downtime.

Platforms help connect disparate data sets from various plant systems and provide a mechanism for Big Data, analytics, and other high-level applications to access data from smart connected devices. These higher level entities increasingly rely on platforms to provide not only connectivity, but also the ability to use applications developed in the platform itself to turn raw data into information for efficient use by higher-level enterprise applications, in this case to reduce and manage operational risk, increase availability, and optimize maintenance costs. ARC believes that Meridium Enterprise APM V4 provides the type of platform needed to create and manage intelligent asset strategies and optimize production and maintenance costs.

What's New in V4?    
Meridium's goal for Enterprise APM V4 was to deliver a satisfying user experience with a modern architecture. To achieve this goal, the company enlisted the expertise of user-interface professionals. The new clean-screen design offers a more visually impactful and intuitive experience, particularly for novice or non-technical users.

Enterprise APM V4 offers an enhanced mechanical integrity (MI) solution for comprehensive risk-based inspection (RBI) assessments based on the latest API 580/581 v3 specifications, ASME B31.8s, and API 1160-based pipeline integrity management capabilities. These enhancements allow integration of information and analytical insights based on response time, degradation mechanism detection, and inspection plan quality for failure prediction. The solution features a risk calculator using specific threats based on Recognized and Generally Accepted Good Engineering Practices (RAGAGEP) standards. An in-line inspections data management and GIS capability provide the capability to absorb and visually represent the data collected during inspection. The solution can also automatically generate inspection effectiveness reports based on user-defined strategies for each threat.

Other enhancements to the Meridium Enterprise APM V4 focus on delivering a 360-degree view of assets. To lower TCO, the standard product now includes more core functionality. The heterogeneous platform favors integration over configuration, making it well suited for plant environments that utilize a multitude of different systems to manage and track inspections, instrumentation, maintenance, safety and production, among many others. Such rich asset-centric context provides deep visibility into asset performance that strategies can be regularly optimized

Meridium has taken an "evergreen" approach with this version by preparing the platform for any potential future needs. This means that the company will be able to automatically push periodic updates to users with little to no delay. Users have a variety of deployment options: on-premises, hosted, mobile, SaaS/Cloud, or hybrid from a single platform. APM Connect, developed by the company's Integration Center of Excellence (ICE), provides standard integration to the most common EAM solutions as well a range of data adapters for other asset management and monitoring systems. More powerful search capabilities in multiple languages have been added.

Conclusion
As enterprises seek to manage greater numbers and types of assets within the plant or factory walls and remote locations, the amount of data created by these smart connected devices will increase exponentially. But all that data will only provide value if integrated with higher level enterprise systems and used intelligently to solve operational as well as business issues. In the case of APM, these include managing operational risk, increasing availability, and optimizing production and maintenance costs. Solutions such as Meridium Enterprise APM capable of providing this connectivity, data processing, analytics, and asset strategy management are emerging as pivotal, value-added components of the IIoT architecture.

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Keywords: Asset Performance Management, Industrial Internet of Things, Reliability, ARC Advisory Group.