Enterprise Asset Management

The Enterprise Asset Management market research study delivers current market analysis plus a five year market and technology forecast. The study is available in multiple editions including worldwide, all regions, and most major countries

Enterprise Asset Management Systems Drive Innovation Across Industries

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system capabilities are expanding to better meet, and exceed, the evolving needs of asset-intensive organizations.  These next-gen solutions offer the visibility required to manage assets and operations within an organization.  In addition to expanding the use of digital transformation, key functional areas include asset information, work order management, MRO materials, labor skills, service contracts, finance, and analytics. 

The four major goals of asset management – uptime, cost control, asset longevity, and safety – represent the key reasons for acquiring EAM systems.  These goals directly affect C-suite objectives in the P&L statement and balance sheet for revenue, cash conservation, profitability, and risk management.

As EAM systems become increasingly intelligent and interconnected, their role as an important repository for enterprise asset data that can be shared with adjacent systems is growing. Customer interest in leveraging EAM to provide greater insight into areas such as asset lifecycle management, asset performance management, and reliability-centered maintenance is driving innovation across industries.

Enterprise Asset Management Strategic Issues

In addition to providing a five-year market forecast, the Enterprise Asset Management market research provides detailed quantitative current market data and addresses key strategic issues as follows.

Adopt Digital Transformation That Can Integrate with EAM

While vitally important in today’s asset-intensive organizations, Industrial IoT, predictive maintenance, augmented reality, digital twins, reliability centered maintenance, and root cause analysis initiatives should be expanded and be viewed as foundation components for digital transformation initiatives within 21st century EAM systems.  

Currently, the dominant application for Industrial IoT and digital transformation involves predictive maintenance (PdM) using data for a specific machine and often leveraging analytics.  The objective is to prevent a failure and the resulting unplanned downtime.  This approach is effective only if, after the alert is generated, someone in the plant executes a work order for an inspection and repair.  Unfortunately, in most plants today, this alert-to-action process has a gap.  Due to ad hoc communications between those receiving the alert and maintenance planning, alerts often become lost or misdirected and the equipment fails as predicted.

Reducing the likelihood of lost alerts and the associated unplanned downtime requires a consistent business process and integration with the EAM system.  Ideally, the alerts go to the maintenance planner for triage and ranking with the higher priority items converted into work orders.

Build Executive Support by Leveraging Digital Transformation

It’s important to be able to develop business cases that generate executive support and are focuses more on key C-suite financial metrics and less on features and functionality.   Enlightened executives are making the connection between typical EAM objectives (such as uptime, asset longevity, cost control, and safety) and enterprise-level business metrics (including revenue, cash conservation, profitability, and risk management).

Boost Production Effectiveness by Increasing Equipment Availability and Decreasing Downtime

With poor maintenance, production equipment fails, often while in use and at the most inconvenient time and is costly.  This interrupts production, causing losses in direct labor and, often, work-in-process materials.  These losses have a direct negative impact on the P&L statement.  With today’s tight scheduling with minimal inventory, an interruption also causes missed shipment dates, customer satisfaction issues, and reduced revenues.  Avoiding unplanned downtime not only improves financial and operational results, but it also elevates vendor and customer relationships.

Extend Asset Longevity

Well-executed maintenance programs allow assets to be more reliable and last longer.  A lack of proper maintenance activities can result in excessive wear and tear, which contributes to premature overhauls or replacement of equipment.   On the other hand, proper maintenance improves the reliability and longevity of assets, delaying the need for costly rebuild projects or capital projects to replace or upgrade equipment.  Thus, proper maintenance available with modern EAM systems can delay new capital expenditures and help conserve capital.  Also, increased uptime provides additional production capacity, often helping defer the need to procure more equipment as the business grows.  

An important yet often overlooked benefit of a modern EAM system is the increase in shareholder value.  The connection between maintenance management and shareholder value can provide a financial justification for EAM purchases and upgrades for end users and a fundamental financial driver for high growth in the EAM market for suppliers.