The industrial sector has significantly advanced in terms of asset management strategies. Combining advanced technologies and automated business processes enable new, higher levels of asset management effectiveness and maturity. ARC classifies maintenance maturity into five types or levels: reactive, preventive (calendar-based), condition-based, predictive, and prescriptive.
Five Levels of APM Maturity
Reactive maintenance, which entails repairing equipment only when it fails, remains viable for several non-critical assets within a plant. If replacement assets are inexpensive, easily available, easy to replace, and do not cause downtime, certainly it will be cost-effective for users to adopt a reactive strategy for such assets.
Calendar-based maintenance, which is often referred to as Preventive maintenance (PM), still remains the most widely employed maintenance strategy. This method typically involves following the original equipment manufacturers (OEM) recommended service schedule.
One level above PM is condition-based maintenance (CM), the second most popular approach as per ARC's research, involves real-time monitoring of asset conditions to determine when maintenance should be performed.
Further advancements came to the APM world with predictive maintenance (PdM). This approach involves gathering data from different systems and assets using sensors and leveraging analytics to project wear and degradation of assets to predict asset failure in advance.
The next level of APM strategies involves prescriptive recommendations. Using data from various sources and leveraging AI and analytics, the Prescriptive Maintenance approach offers recommended actions and may include capabilities that can trigger actions automatically.
While technological advancements have enabled organizations to choose from a variety of APM strategies, it has made asset management more complicated. While prescriptive maintenance may be the best approach to achieving the highest level of reliability and asset availability, it does not make sense to adopt this strategy for all of our assets.
Most end users are looking to choose an APM strategy based on the criticality of the assets. Determining the criticality level of the assets is not an easy task. Furthermore, there may be several other factors such as age of the asset, availability of resources, and budget information, that need to be considered when deciding on the maintenance strategy, making such decisions more complicated than ever before.
ARC Advisory Group recommends that industrial organizations should carefully review their asset management strategy and consider pilot projects for the adoption of advanced asset management technologies– especially for complex assets and systems.
How Can ARC Help?
ARC's analysts can help you analyze your current asset performance and identify the best opportunities for improvement. They can also educate you on technologies and best practices that you can use to improve your performance and help you select the solutions that are most suitable for your company.
Functioning as members of your own internal Asset Performance Management team, ARC's analysts can add our unique knowledge of technologies, suppliers and other APM programs to accelerate your continuous improvement efforts.