In today’s fast-paced economies, you need to manage highly operational assets and equipment to keep up with production and service requirements. The slightest of downtime could cause a loss in quality or productivity. To avoid the same, regularize maintenance operations to extract maximum value from your assets and create a safe working environment. For this reason, manage asset performance and practice asset management throughout the organization.
What Is Asset Performance?
Asset Performance relates to an organization’s ability to utilize operational resources, manage them effectively, and generate profitable returns. As stated previously, it extracts the maximum value from an asset and increases its lifecycle in the most cost-efficient fashion.
Similarly, Asset Performance Management (APM) is a set of tools that actualize asset performance and ensure assets’ reliability and availability while capping costs and risks. APMs typically run on data and share actionable insights on the appropriate and necessary actions at any point.
In essence, APM draws direct relations between asset performance and maintenance management with overall profitability. Companies can use this data-driven information to streamline their performance, track work orders for preventive maintenance of assets and equipment, identify at-risk assets, ensure regulatory compliance, and make informed decisions while handling assets. They can also measure their performance against other companies and track performance over time.
Why Does Asset Performance Management Matter?
One of the greatest advantages of APM is its data-centricity. Businesses can now rely on robust, reliable, and immutable data to remove inefficiencies and increase asset lifecycles. Furthermore, APM systems can identify areas of improvement and suggest how they can be incorporated in the future.
Other benefits of APM include:
Targeted Maintenance: An APM can point out the assets and equipment that call for reactive or preventive maintenance tasks. Meaning, your assets, and equipment are neither neglected nor over-maintained without wasting any time.
- Improved Efficiency: A data-driven environment leaves room for greater efficiency. Additionally, perfectly maintained assets waste less material, consume less energy, and deliver better results – all of which improve overall efficiency.
- Targeted Improvement: The APM data can highlight the bottlenecks or inefficiencies present in your process or the way that you use your assets. Using this data, you can address these issues and manage work orders and assets effectively.
- Safe Work Environment: Monitoring your assets and equipment allows you to detect those operating beyond safety limits. Hence, you can alert your maintenance teams of possible complications and carry out preventive maintenance activities before an accident takes place.
- Improved Reliability: Because APM ensures preventive maintenance, optimum performance, greater regulatory compliance, and fewer breakdowns of assets and equipment, your organization will enjoy higher reliability and availability of resources.
- Efficient Prioritization: Not all preventive maintenance work order schedules deserve the same level of priority. This fact stands true, especially when evaluating a higher preventive maintenance cost versus the cost of failure. Accordingly, APMs can help you make an informed decision on how to prioritize the right tasks.
How to Measure Asset Performance?
Measuring asset performance may vary from industry to industry. However, the following are some basic steps to measure and manage asset performance:
1. Identify
The first line of action is to identify all the assets, subassemblies or subcomponents, and individual parts. While, in practice, it may seem like an easy task, asset identification can get progressively tougher depending on your organizational size and structure.
2. Locate
Upon identifying your assets, map them to their locations. Apart from stationary assets, one also needs to track mobile assets, such as vehicles. For this purpose, technologies like GIS (Graphic Information System) and GPS (Global Positioning System) can come handy.
3. Assess
Next, you need to know the status and condition of the asset. Maintenance teams can carry out visual inspections of asset conditions.
Thereafter, an informed decision can be made. Should you create work orders for preventive maintenance? Or should a process of decommissioning the asset begin? And so on.
4. Understand
While evaluating the assets and equipment, consider the specifications that indicate the maximum efficiency and highest output of the operating asset. Accordingly, the acceptable range of operation is recorded against the asset.
5. Maintain
One of the core components of managed maintenance is creating a maintenance care plan. The maintenance plan depends on the asset’s condition, risk of failure, and impact on overall performance. Thus, critical assets will benefit from an elaborate preventive maintenance plan, while non-essential assets that operate infrequently can run on corrective maintenance plans.
6. Track
Finally, companies need to track the KPIs and maintenance costs to identify the assets that can be decommissioned. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is the best software package tool to carry out this task.
CMMS: The Best Way to Track and Manage Asset Performance
Computerized Maintenance Management Systems, or CMMS software, streamlines asset management to give productivity a boost. As an effective maintenance management system, CMMS allows companies to stay on top of their maintenance and care plans for each asset. It makes use of a unified dashboard to capture all CMMS data inputs in the form of reports that empower companies to make informed decisions.
While CMMS solutions are ideal for single-location plants if you need to cover multiple sites and users, be sure you are working with a scalable offering. CMMS solutions can help businesses manage their asset performance effectively.
