Advanced APM Strategies

Executive Overview

As digital transformation continues to expand across asset-intensive industries, asset performance management (APM) capabilities are increasingly at the center of C-level discussions with maintenance, operations, and IT teams.

Asset performance management is an approach to managing assets that prioritizes business objectives in addition to traditional asset reliability and availability goals. APM has become a primary driver of digital transformation for many industrial companies. Modern APM combines traditional asset management practices with new digital technologies for transformation advances in reliability, maintenance execution, and business performance.

APM sits astride maintenance tasks that increasingly intersect with operations activity and innovative, customer-facing business processes. Successful asset performance management begins by clearly articulating business goals and leveraging digital tools and applications to better understand opportunities for process improvement. From there, maintenance teams (and operations in some cases), can more thoroughly evaluate how to best implement various digital transformation  initiatives in maintenance and operations.

APM builds on traditional practices and applications with data and digital tools to optimize asset performance within the ecosystem, supporting competitive excellence and other business goals:

• Practices and apps: Traditional practices and applications become more effective when enhanced with data, digital tools, and support for business goals.
• Data and analysis: Enable greater depth of collaboration across the asset ecosystem by using digital twin, digital thread, and other modern information assimilation and management approaches.
• Digital tools: Apply modern technologies across a range of tools like smart devices, augmented reality, and mobility to improve business processes and create new methods for asset management.
• Asset ecosystem: The ecosystem for assets extends beyond the plant floor and facilities to include a wide range of applications across asset-intensive industries that leverage sophisticated OT, IT and engineering systems and related production, maintenance, and engineering personnel. It also encompasses third-party partners and other providers of parts and services.
• Business goals: Through digital transformation in asset and risk management, and improvements in asset availability and uptime, users achieve higher revenue and profitability while improving customer satisfaction with on-time delivery and quality. In many cases, asset management execution may be tuned to ensure that customer and market needs take priority in maintenance scheduling.

Assessing the Trajectory of Asset Management in Organizations

Today’s organizations require asset performance capabilities that go beyond traditional maintenance management approaches to include improved visibility and access to a wide range of organizational data. Asset and process reliability and scalability of solutions is needed in today’s next-generation APM solutions.

It may be helpful to think of asset management – and APM in particular – as a continuum. In some cases, traditional work and asset management processes that employ basic planning and scheduling and work documentation, can be sufficient in some plants and facilities. For others, access to real-time information and access to advanced planning and forecasting capabilities may be required.

A good example of the advancements made in advanced asset management can be seen in the following chart. It illustrates how far asset management has evolved in the recent past and shows pathways for more robust and sophisticated asset management strategies. This can be a helpful visual guide for organizations to assess the paths that they may want to consider.

Factors Driving Increased Interest in APM

Discussions about advanced asset management strategies are increasingly focused on an evolving and expanding view of APM. This view spans multiple facets of asset management with visibility into operational conditions and needs; and delivered as part of an extensive digital transformation journey. This journey includes intelligent assets communicating through an integrated digital thread with a wide range of smart assets and networks spanning the asset ecosystem.

At the same time, organizations must not lose sight of the importance that work, labor, inventory, and materials management play in the effective operation of today’s maintenance management programs. These areas are more important than ever, with demographic factors such as an aging workforce entering retirement age and economic factors related to COVID and global competition creating new challenges and headwinds for asset-intensive organizations.

The reach of APM in particular extends into business processes, technology, and organizational structure. This digitalization includes Industrial IoT and analytics to enable more effective asset maintenance strategies using condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, and prescriptive maintenance, using such techniques as predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to anticipate potential issues and failures and slow or halt actual problems.

A key objective of APM is to optimize the performance of physical assets in their operating ecosystem to meet dynamic production and business goals. An evolving view of next-gen APM capabilities includes key elements of asset management functions, including maintenance planning, scheduling, execution, condition monitoring, and reliability-centered maintenance root-cause analysis capabilities offered as part of APM solutions. In addition, such capabilities as Industrial IoT, edge computing, data management and interoperability, and predictive analyses are critically important for efficient APM systems.

Table of Contents

• Executive Overview
• Assessing the Trajectory of Asset Management in Organizations
• Factors Driving Increased Interest in APM
• APM Drives Successful Asset Management Outcomes and Substantial Business Benefits
• Recommendations

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