Asset integrity management is a critical area for energy companies and industrial businesses. Well-maintained equipment lasts longer, yielding a greater return on investment over the long time. Furthermore, protecting your operational infrastructure from damage can prevent disasters that lead to fines or major downtime due to disabled equipment. Nevertheless, the key to managing your assets well is to use technology to your advantage. Here’s how to implement technology to manage your assets properly.
Understanding Asset Integrity Management
All assets degrade over time. Environmental exposure, operations, and maintenance mistakes can accelerate that degradation to the point of failure. As you scale up your operations, there’s more equipment to keep track of and maintain. Eventually, the scope of your asset management will exceed human management capacity. The only solution then is to hire more people, but this method is inefficient as it increases costs. Asset integrity management systems solve that problem.
By implementing a data-driven platform that can analyze your assets, you can manage your assets more easily with fewer workers. In addition, this technology also unlocks several other potential applications, like preventative maintenance. You can analyze the financial impact of your assets more clearly as well, making it easier to plan upgrades and spend wisely in the future. Above all, you’ll keep your equipment running well, which will translate to more consistent profits.
Technology Reveals Your Real Needs
When most companies handle asset integrity manually, they usually follow set maintenance schedules. Due to a lack of staff, they may also outsource maintenance work to a third party. As a result, you may not know the true state of your equipment. Maintenance schedules are manufacturer recommendations, but actual conditions vary based on usage and environmental conditions. With a smart system, you can use data to determine what needs to be serviced and when.
How do these systems work? Suppose you plug in variables such as equipment age and usage. You then add some environmental factors, for instance ambient temperatures or water quality characteristics for an offshore oil rig. Next, you’ll need live data to measure operating performance. Sensors can be installed to feed data into the system. Add the optimal operating parameters set by the manufacturer. All this data must be relayed to a cloud server. What happens next?
Using Data From Your Operations to Manage Assets Intelligently
The data you capture from your equipment combined with the other variables you fill in will then be processed using algorithms to detect patterns in the data. Real-time data can indicate imminent equipment failures which will allow you to prioritize those assets for maintenance. Perhaps, over time, you’ll find that certain assets in specific conditions fail faster, which you can address with more frequent maintenance or by replacing components with more resilient ones.
By connecting all of your assets to a single central system, you’ll also be able to get a macro understanding of your asset performance. What percentage of your assets are operating as they should be right now? What portion of your equipment will need service next month? If you cannot readily answer these questions within a minute, you’re due to upgrade your AIM system. Modern AIM tools will deliver data through personalized dashboards to your engineers.
Use Automation to Schedule Maintenance
Once you have data regarding your assets, you can further automate asset management to facilitate your operations. For instance, you can automate maintenance scheduling so that as soon as a piece of equipment starts to slide out of spec, an order can be pushed out to perform maintenance. This proactive approach is more efficient than routine maintenance and will save you both time and money. Your maintenance team’s schedules can be automatically scanned to see who’s available to optimize assignments.
As technicians perform maintenance, your system can be updated in real time to reflect the ongoing work, allowing you to monitor downtime and ensure that jobs are completed on time. This is also very helpful if you work with third-party maintenance providers, who can be unreliable with their timelines. Keeping track of performance in real time has other benefits as well.
Managing Asset Finances
As you learn more about your assets and monitor their performance, you’ll also be able to derive financial data. By comparing the expense of components and their installation to the value yielded from operations, you can measure asset efficiency. This can help you determine when to replace assets, or whether your investments should be redirected to more profitable activities.
You can plan scaling and spending intelligently when you have accurate data about your equipment’s performance. With your smart system, you could experiment with hypothetical expansion scenarios. Data from your current and past operations can be projected forward to give you a clearer picture of the value of an investment in a new factory or additional extraction site.
Improve Asset Efficiency With Testing
Asset management is more effective when you use the right assets in the first place. Smart asset efficiency testbeds can be used to compare replacement components to current ones, or help you select the right equipment to deploy. With accurate data from testbeds, you can compare equipment to your existing infrastructure to see how much of an improvement you can expect.
This approach also improves asset integrity since you’ll have accurate test data on anything you deploy, making future maintenance more predictable. Investing in testing will support your AIM efforts and make unfortunate surprises far less likely.
Complete a Digital Transformation
Everything we’ve recommended involves collecting and processing data to derive insights from your activities. Successful companies will need to be entirely digital. If your company has yet to start this digital transformation, you risk falling behind the competition.
Contact SAAB RDS to learn how we can help you manage your assets more intelligently through powerful digital business tools.