How to get the most out of your EAM systems

Enterprise asset management systems are a fundamental tool for large organizations today. They are critical for managing capital projects, optimizing plant assets, ensuring maintenance does not impact productivity, and even used to manage real estate assets.  However, these great tools are often underutilized and lack the ability to integrate critical documents required to manage and maintain enterprise assets. Qellus has the key you need to unlock the full potential of your EAM system.

As an organization grows, trusting asset data becomes more important to ensure success and efficiency across the business. Specifically, for industries such as Energy, Oil & Gas, Utilities, Mining, and Manufacturing, performance and profitability are directly influenced by how efficiently assets are managed. 

This is why it is critical to get the most out of your EAM systems, yet many companies struggle to leverage the full potential between ERP and EAM systems. 

The Challenges of an EAM system

It’s easy to see data quality issues that arise from aggregating data points from different systems – the same issues arise from inconsistent asset documentation.  How does your EAM system ensure you have the right source of truth for engineering drawings, maintenance contracts, work orders, and contracts?   Imagine if you could unlock the full potential of your EAM investment, drive out operational costs and improve safety? 

EAM systems are expensive and are capable of doing incredible things – however, many businesses only end up using a fraction of the full functionality on offer. The unused potential of an EAM system could make a difference in your workplace. 

This is why implementing best practices that span your procurement, legal, finance, maintenance, and operations teams is critical when implementing an EAM system. By using best practices and the most efficient methods, you can uncover whole new ways of extracting insights and value from your EAM system.

Unlocking the True Potential of EAM

The challenge, of course, is how to find new and better ways to get more from your investment in your EAM software. 

This is not easy. It is difficult to find the time to learn how to get the most out of your systems and discover how to effectively use all the tools available. Indeed, figuring out whether you could even use those tools in better ways can take time, money, and effort before you can begin to let the system do the heavy lifting.

See if these questions sound relatable to you:

• Are you being asked to cut costs despite managing an increasingly complex asset inventory?
• Do your teams struggle to have access to critical documents in the field?
• Do inconsistencies in asset data and documents reduce trust in your EAM system?
• Are you concerned that the wrong asset information could lead to a safety incident?
• Do you struggle to keep asset data in your ERP consistent with that in your engineering and EAM systems?
• Are you looking for more intelligent insights about your assets?
• Are you missing opportunities because the system just isn’t coping?

If you find yourself nodding along to any of these questions – don’t panic. It’s more common than you may believe for an organization to have a powerful EAM system at their disposal without the time to make the most out of its sophisticated functionality.

This is where a health check of your EAM system could help you unlock the true potential of your system that you’re looking for.

The EAM health check

Without your EAM system running at 100%, things can begin to fall apart. When you notice some of the consequences of an unhealthy or underutilized EAM solution, it may just be time for a full review.

You need to understand where and how you could be saving time, getting more done, and getting it done better.  It could be that the process between finance and plant maintenance is not integrated, causing confusion in the payment of work orders.  

It could be that engineering drawings are not efficiently shared with vendors, or are not trusted due to inconsistent versions.  Perhaps as-built documentation is not easily produced for audit and compliance. 

All small things, indeed – but with potentially serious consequences.

Whatever the problem may be, an EAM health check is there to find out:

1. What percentage of the system you’re effectively implementing and
2. What is yet to be integrated with the system

When you know the details of these two points, you can begin to unlock the full potential of your EAM system.

Performing an EAM health check

In order to perform an EAM health check, you may require the outside services of an EAM consultant or expert for a fresh pair of eyes.

Regardless, whoever conducts the health check should look into:

• How your daily workflow operates
• Review your current methods and procedures and
• Identify key opportunities for future improvements

The person performing the EAM health check will then be able to pinpoint errors, detect weaknesses in the system, and help prevent future challenges.

When dealing with a third-party professional that is analyzing your system, you could gain valuable insights and a fresh perspective. They can quickly identify deficiencies, improve your processes, and help to optimize your EAM system to make your job a lot easier.

EAM health check requirements

• The health check must examine your current processes and study your present processes supporting your EAM solution.
• It must be non-obtrusive and enable you to continue working without downtime.
• It must be a collaborative process with the engineers, supervisors,  maintenance and operations, and technology staff providing input.
• A general system health check usually takes 2-3 days for a medium-sized business. This can vary depending on the size and complexity of the system.
• A comprehensive, in-depth report should be included at the conclusion of the check, providing a full appraisal of your current situation as well as recommendations for improvement.

The Next Step

After the health check has been performed, you will be informed of the best possible courses of action available to you. These may require major changes, a few tweaks, or something in-between. Regardless of the outcome, you will understand where the opportunities are and what you can do to capitalize on them.

If you are looking for a partner to help you optimize your EAM system, look no further than Qellus.

Qellus has been in the IT solution industry for years and has extensive information management knowledge in SAP PM, Maximo, and Infor. We have the experience and guidance you need to optimize your asset management processes by leveraging information and data across your organization.

Now, you can finally be confident in the reliability of the asset and maintenance information in your EAM processes and reduce unplanned downtime and maintenance costs. Contact us today for a free consultation and we will show you how Qellus creates the missing link to increase the utilization of your ERP and EAM solution.