The five components necessary for asset performance management

Prioritize your business objectives through APM

As an asset-intensive business, you always need to find ways to optimize your business performance and overall productivity. Maintenance is a large part of that goal, but the process demands a lot of resources which are often misdirected at non-critical assets. By focusing on higher-value assets, you can perform intelligent maintenance that drives performance improvements where it counts and allocates resources more efficiently. This is the core of Asset Performance Management’s (APM) value proposition.

However, you can’t just begin to adopt Asset Performance Management processes into your organization without any preparation. There are five key components you need to have in place to ensure that your APM activities are successful. This blog will discuss what APM is, how you can benefit from it, and the 5 key components you need to implement it.

What is Asset Performance Management?

Asset Performance Management (APM) is an approach to managing assets that prioritize business objectives in addition to traditional asset reliability and availability goals. It is a departure from the old approach of ‘maintenance in isolation from the rest of the business’. 
In the past, maintenance was solely concerned with the reliability and cost of maintaining assets. This led to many departments operating as independent islands disconnected from the production and EHS procurement. This approach sets the goal of always maintaining every asset equally with a goal of 100% reliability. This often led to possible over-maintenance, wasted maintenance, and misdirected maintenance activities on assets that weren’t critical to the business's operations.
APM takes the goals and operation of other departments in the organization. This way, other departments are considered for asset maintenance and performance prioritization. APM can thus influence the priority, criticality, and adjustment of asset maintenance for the organization's overall benefit.
APM has since become a primary enabler of digital transformation for asset management for many industrial organizations. The most effective APM techniques include traditional asset management practices powered by new digital technologies that boost reliability, execution, and business performance.

5 Key Components for Asset Performance Management

Before an organization can fully embrace APM, they need to have 5 key components in place:

An understanding of the challenges of other departments
Every department must have a basic understanding of how other departments operate. Each team member needs to know, at minimum, what the purpose of those departments is, their goals, and their challenges.
With APM, each department participates as an equal, committed to learning and understanding each other. This way, they can collaboratively find joint solutions and agree to share information for the common good.

A Common Master Data Management standard

Part of working together is agreeing to a base set of data management standards and procedures. A common Master Data Management standard is the first step toward this goal, helping every department get on the same page when assessing where resources should be allocated for maintenance.
Master Data Management standards must be determined and applied upstream, downstream, and cross-stream across the asset life cycle. This may require some departments to rework and/or change and adopt common standards to identify, connect, and optimize asset performance across departments.

Ability to quantify, access, and utilize accurate costs for APM

Each department needs to be upfront with the cost of asset maintenance and events and their impact on the organization. This is critical for effective APM, as it will inform which maintenance will have the best overall business impact. This information should be systematically evaluated, captured, and included in each asset or system's APM “body of knowledge”.

By understanding the general business impact and maintenance required, leaders can use APM to make the most effective use of their resources and time for maximum business value.

Collaboration on asset information within and between applications

For the most efficient use of APM, each departmental system or asset needs to be able to share and integrate data effectively. Applications should be able to ‘speak’ to one another and provide a picture of overall business performance. 
This is where having a common Master Data Management (MDM) standard will come in handy. Each department will need to collaborate using a common asset reference (MDM) and expose related content from various applications for the assets within and between EAM systems. This will allow APM to ensure availability, costs, and safe operations for assets across the organization.

Flexible cross-functional Information dashboards and decision models

APM demand that maintenance and asset procedures no longer be “set and forget”. You need to take a proactive approach to ensure your assets are in working order and that the right assets are available in the most critical areas of your business. This requires flexibility and a dynamic view of asset management.

Companies with flexible and cross-functional information dashboards and decision models will have a huge advantage. Throughout a business’ lifecycle, production schedules change, equipment ages, and new regulatory requirements are deployed - all of which can be tracked with detailed dashboards. Having all this information will help you assign maintenance where needed most.

The ability to share information from and to the asset management systems requires robust content and information sharing tools provided by ECM systems. By providing clear visibility to the most recent asset data, documents, and drawings, ECM systems are a required component of any successful APM solution.  

Taking the next step for proactive maintenance

Asset Performance Maintenance may seem daunting at first, but implementing such an approach can transform the effectiveness of your company. By allocating maintenance where needed most, over maintenance and wasted maintenance are things of the past, enabling you to save money and optimize your business.
However, getting your data and content aligned across your organization is the first step toward effective APM.  Finding ways to interconnect existing processes and getting your departments on the same page relies on data sharing and integrations. Using technology as a connector between machines, operations, equipment, and people are complicated for many organizations. Without doing so, they will never be able to achieve maintenance that is simpler and easier to control. Qellus can directly assist these organizations, preparing their ECM and EAM systems for better and more advanced maintenance practices, like Asset Performance Management.

Contact us today. We’ll outline where you can find substantial gains in your maintenance procedures and help you implement Asset Performance Management the right way today.