Asset Durability for a Responsible Economy: APM+
At a glance - what is an APM+?
A platform based on asset integrity and reliability engineering practices capable of helping plan capital investments for an organization, considering asset health, maintenance and growth budgets in addition to environmental aspects.
An APM+ is thus a platform for managing data across the entire lifecycle of an organization's assets, to maximize their utilization and minimize their total cost of ownership. It enables relevant data to be collected, centralized and structured for high-value analysis and simulation. An APM+ supports well-documented decision-making at all organizational levels and serves as an inter-tier communication tool.
Introduction
Asset durability management is an essential maintenance practice to ensure that an infrastructure or piece of equipment can perform its functions safely and efficiently. This intelligent intervention practice ensures rigorous monitoring of assets to repair and maintain components as required. This limits their deterioration and optimizes their use, with the aim of prolonging their service life and reducing their environmental impact.
For organizations, durable asset management is a logical choice for organizational performance. It helps to postpone replacement investments, minimize downtime, mitigate risks to employees and avoid disruption to operations, as well as improving environmental performance. Managing an organization's assets is essential for producing and generating value. Without durable practices that take into account all environmental, social and governance (ESG) aspects, it could find itself in serious financial and reputational difficulty.
It is a well-known fact that 80% of the infrastructure such as docks or industrial buildings that will exist in 2050 is already built today. Extending the lifecycle and performance of these assets in the most efficient way possible will be an important lever for organizations.
Intelligent asset durability management requires a holistic approach involving a multitude of factors. In particular, it must take into account asset health, associated risk, performance, residual life, maintenance costs, carbon emissions and other environmental and community impacts. It is in line with the outline of the ISO 55 000 standard provided by the Institute of Asset Management (IAM).
As IAM's asset management best practices indicate, asset durability management must be based on a solid foundation of centralized and structured information. Even today, most organizations can pride themselves on collecting an enormous amount of data, but a large proportion of this still has untapped potential for data analysis. From both an environmental and an economic point of view, it is absolutely essential to maximize the potential of the data collected.
Durability
Durability is a conscious choice that characterizes asset management practice. In a context where climate change is already leaving its mark and does not augur well for the future if nothing changes, we need to do more than just raise awareness. We need a framework, a method and a working structure for concrete action. In this sense, the linear economy based on rapid consumption and early decisions on asset disposal are no longer enviable. We need to move towards a durable and intelligent economy.
It goes without saying that companies must change their social behavior, as this will inevitably have an impact on their long-term viability. They must become agents of change through their day-to-day decisions, particularly in terms of asset durability. We are already seeing some salutary efforts in this direction. However, they can't be experts in every field, especially when it comes to innovative decarbonization practices or natural asset management, for example.
Administrative decision-making is becoming increasingly complex, given the multiplication of precise parameters to be considered. Durable asset management is one way of meeting this responsibility, by limiting the impact of organizations' activities on the environment and adopting practices that respect human rights, health and safety. More specifically, organizations will need to pay particular attention to energy consumption, waste production, water management and greenhouse gas emissions when making decisions. Critical organizational decisions must be supported by a decision-support platform that considers the parameters of importance.
In this context, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools will quickly decide which organizations emerge as the next winners or losers. If an organization structures its data appropriately for analysis by machine learning engines, it will undoubtedly be in the top group. If organizations are to survive, they need to integrate new business intelligence tools quickly. An APM+ offers the necessary structure and relevant AI tools for asset durability management.
APM+ Pillars
While classic Asset Performance Management (APM) is a type of software used to maximize the performance and reliability of a company's assets by employing real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance and risk management techniques to minimize downtime, APM+ has the advantage of broadening its analysis framework. To provide a real decision-making tool for asset management, an APM+-type platform includes functions for understanding the actual state of health of assets, measuring environmental performance and designing a capital asset management plan. To these three pillars must be added the preparation of data for machine learning to make it a modern platform.
Taken individually, there's nothing revolutionary about each pillar. However, its originality and relevance are embodied in the combination of the pillars. These four pillars are essential to assist organizations in their business decisions.
Health Status of Working People
In-depth knowledge of the true state of health of an organization's assets is at the root of any informed decision tree. An organization should therefore be able to easily access the basic information, relevant documentation, performance, severity of defects and of course the risk (probability x consequences) associated with all assets. Risk management is an imperative element of asset durability management. It enables organizations to mitigate the risk associated with asset degradation, maintenance costs, regulatory non-compliance, accidents and so on. A failure can have a major impact on an organization's environment, reputation and finances, as well as on the safety of surrounding workers and citizens. Without this centralized, structured knowledge of risk, an organization navigates without a map or compass.
Environmental Data
Measuring environmental performance in the areas of energy management, waste management, water management and carbon management is now an essential indicator of good organizational management. Every business decision includes an environmental cost that must be taken into consideration. Financial institutions, government bodies and civil society expect that an organization's economic performance will no longer be achieved at the expense of environmental and societal aspects. What were once formulated as broad principles are now interwoven into an increasingly binding framework under the ESG umbrella.
In addition, taking climate change resilience into account in the asset durability management has become essential in order to minimize the risks associated with extreme climatic events and guarantee their operation in the event of disruption. To achieve this, asset managers need to identify and measure the variables that can have an impact on infrastructures and equipment. These variables can then be used to simulate risks and plan appropriate maintenance.
Measuring environmental performance and resilience to climate change in all its aspects is the first step towards improving practices and setting measurable, resolutely ambitious targets. ADM is the first type of system capable of adding environmental components for sustainable and intelligent asset durability management.
Investment Planning
An ADM-type tool must offer the functions required for responsible, dynamic and planned management of an organization's budgets. By combining risk and environmental variables with financial aspects, decision-makers should be able to simulate scenarios based on economic parameters, enabling them to make better decisions. This will enable them to manage the entire lifecycle of their assets, maximizing their use and minimizing their total cost of ownership. Managers will thus have evidence-based data transforming their intuitive decision-making practice to the confirmation or documented information of working hypotheses.
For their part, integrity, reliability and maintenance professionals, not to mention the various departments, will greatly accelerate their strategic asset management planning work. The accumulation of recommended interventions, costed and scheduled according to their risk matrix, in one and the same place, will continuously populate their strategic plan. They should be able to articulate a plan that couples the investment, growth or maintenance budgets that separate them from current operational budgets.
Data Centralization
These three pillars absolutely must be supported by a database that centralizes, structures and categorizes all asset-related data. This data organization makes comparing information much simpler and more efficient. This is an essential step in the preparation of data prior to the use of AI tools. An organization will take advantage of AI tools to make truly informed and well-documented decisions.
This database must also include the asset evolution history, tracing all asset events. For reliability specialists or integrity experts, planning the actions to be taken to mitigate the risk of asset failure will be much easier if they know the behaviors and interventions of the past.
This common base on asset health, costs and environmental performance will ensure better multi-level organizational collaboration. It will unify dashboards, providing a clear vision. Different departments and levels will have a simple, effective communication tool, justifying difficult decisions on the basis of known and visualizable parameters.
The ecosystem of asset management software solutions
It's true that there are a number of tools on the market claiming to aid asset management decision-making. It's understandable that managers get lost in the shuffle. All the more so as most of the tools have a specialty, whether it's the management of one or more asset types, or the exploitation of a part of the asset lifecycle.
So how does the little + in APM+ prove to be an important addition to intelligent, efficient asset management?
To answer this question, it is first essential to understand the types of asset management systems used in an industrial environment. Briefly, the main ones are: Computerized Maintenance Management (CMMS), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Asset Investment Planning (AIP), Enterprise Sustainability Reporting Software Solutions (ESRS) and, of course, the classic Asset Performance Management (APM). All these types of system play their part in assisting engineers, reliability specialists, integrity specialists, technicians, maintenance superintendents, asset managers and executives responsible for maintaining physical assets.
Other software includes Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Asset Integrity Management Systems, GIS systems, IoT platforms, data historians and SCADA systems. All can play a more or less important role in the asset management IT ecosystem.
This software coverage may seem complete, but there are still some significant gaps.
First, none of these systems is dedicated to centralizing health-check information on an entire asset pool, capable of tracking the entire lifecycle over time.
On the one hand, CMMS and EAM systems are essentially IT systems for managing all a company's maintenance activities, including tracking maintenance work, managing spare parts inventories and managing maintenance service providers. On the other hand, conventional APMs can feed in performance data from rotating assets or production machinery. The latter optimizes asset availability and reliability through the power of its calculations. This popular combination, however, takes little account of fixed assets such as stacks, tanks, pressure vessels or piping, which are all part of the process. Above all, it fails to consider major assets such as buildings, docks, cranes and other critical assets.
AIP is also used to plan investments in a company's assets. This practice is essential, but the software is dependent on the data it receives. The same applies to ESRS systems, which are attracting increasing attention. This is software that enables companies to analyze and report on their environmental performance. If such software is not coupled with a centralized, structured database capable of providing the true state of health of assets, it cannot offer adequate decision support.
Specialized software is very important for decision support in organizations and will remain so in the future. For these reasons, all software must be open to interconnection and interoperability. These two criteria should imperatively be on an organization's analysis grid when purchasing asset management software.
In this sense, an APM+ is first and foremost a data centralization platform communicating with all an organization's data sources, to ensure knowledge of the health check as well as the operational and environmental performance of an entire asset base. The centralization of information enables APM+ to offer this +, i.e.: capital planning for asset maintenance or replacement, asset integrity management, environmental performance management (carbon equivalent, energy efficiency, drinking water, waste), visualization of relevant indicators via a dynamic dashboard, inclusion of ESG indicator data, asset lifecycle management and risk management. This information will enable organizations to extend the life of assets and focus on real priorities.
Towards a Durable Economic Future
An APM+-type system integrated into an asset durability management practice is necessary for making informed, rapid and documented decisions that take all ESG aspects into account. No decision should be taken without a holistic view of social, environmental and economic parameters. APM+ can make the difference for organizations concerned with a durable economic future in harmony with their environment and people. Responsible organizations will undoubtedly be the most resilient to change, as they adapt to present and future challenges. An APM+ system can become a first-rate tool in the toolbox of forward-looking organizations.
