15 minute read
The essence of... Asset Performance Management
WHAT IS IT AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
The definition of Asset Performance
Asset Performance is a measure of the assets capability to perform each required function. In short, it is what the business owner wants the asset to do in a safe and of course in a reliable way. So, the word “performance” may take different shapes depending on what the particular requirements of the operator or asset owner are. The criteria of success are typically related to the dimensions of risk management and cost optimization, and of course to the ability to meet the desired production levels.
The definition of Asset Performance Management
Gartner [1] , a technological research and consulting firm, has introduced this term some 20 years ago as “the capabilities of data capture, integration, visualization and analytics tied together for the explicit purpose of improving the reliability and availability of physical assets”.
We define Asset Performance Management as the ecosystem of required work processes focused on taking care of our assets. They should be integrated together in order to deliver the relevant requirements for the business in terms of the asset performance.
The difference with maintenance
Maintenance itself is a way to execute an asset strategy. Asset Performance Management is a set of work processes focused on designing and evergreening the risk-based, cost-effective asset strategy. When we talk about these processes, we also consider the primary and secondary functions of the asset. What are the associated risks with this function? What do we need to do to mitigate those risks? That is why we need cross-functional teams and departments to take care of the asset.
Asset Performance Management comes from the need to integrate multiple work processes, which have been historically defined based on equipment classes and the different departments which are present in an asset owner/operator organization:
• Integrity and inspection departments managing fixed assets from strategy definition to inspection execution for risk management and compliance with local regulations.
• Reliability departments managing the strategy portion for rotating and electrical equipment, having the maintenance department as its execution arm.
• Instrumentation departments managing strategies and execution along with maintenance for instruments calibration and Safety Instrumented Systems proof-tests.
APM is strategy and asset centric. Maintenance and traditional operations are a way in which you can execute a part of those desired and defined mitigation actions based on the relevant strategy.
For example, a critical compression system contains assets from all classes: static, rotating, electrical, safety… All of them have to eventually become part of one strategy, so that each different team, from their own angle, can take the necessary actions to mitigate risks.
© GE Digital
Imagine if it is not just one critical compression system but an installation that has hundreds of different asset types, of different criticality criteria, different functions… and all of them need to align with one reliability and strategy goal for the company. Managing all of this together - from risks over mitigation to selecting the relevant maintenance strategy standpoint - that is asset performance management.
The importance of Asset Performance Management
Managing industrial assets is an important part of strategy and day-to-day operations for corporations as they pursue asset availability in order to increase production throughput and increase revenue, improve reliability to reduce environment and safety risks, and prevent costly failures that drain the maintenance budget.
In a world which is becoming more aware of the effects of global warming and the importance of becoming carbon neutral, running asset intensive operations without experiencing functional failures is key to keeping carbon emissions in check.
The building blocks of Asset Performance Management
If we break Asset Performance Management into the following steps, we get:
1. First of all, you need to understand which assets you have in the organization. Which categories, classes and techniques are currently being engaged to manage them? The common framework to understand which assets you have is to understand how critical they are for a given operation. This means understanding what risks they potentially can possess, ranging from environment, health and safety to impact operations and budgets.
2. Based on this framework you can identify which assets are highly critical and understand which risks are not tolerated by the organisation's business goals. That is what helps you identify which assets are your bad actors or troublemakers.
3. Then you need to define what the relative risk mitigation strategy should be. To answer this question, you employ different methodologies: 1. Risk based inspections for static assets 2. Failure modes and effects analysis for components 3. Reliability-centered maintenance for more complex systems
All these methodologies effectively depend on the asset function. You can ask yourself: How can the asset still perform its function? In what way is this going to be important for us? What are the consequences of each function fading? This will naturally bring you to thinking about the necessary risk mitigation tasks, actions or recommendations.
There is also a distinctive type of predominantly critical asset that has a safety function. For example safety-instrumentation systems for instrumentational loops designed to shut down the operation when things go wrong and guarantee that it can be done in a safe way. That is also a different methodology that looks at a different type of these particular assets.
4. The next phase is the execution. Here, you might want to consider strategies and actions that will mitigate the risks, including routine preventive maintenance. Examples are: Visual inspections, which are operation driven, non-destructive testing of static assets, proof testing for safety systems, calibrating of your sensors, monitoring your assets condition with the help of Predictive Analytics, or Health Management, or by field data collection by operators.
5. Then you need to identify which corrective actions you need to take. Or maybe you want to deploy more enhanced tools like predictive diagnostics that reassess the assets behavioral patterns, raise the alerts based on those particular deviations and create recommendations. Maybe you even make the decision to do no scheduled maintenance at all for the assets that are low risk and do not have high-cost failures. Maybe the strategy would be to do no investment of any maintenance in those assets. All that is in your execution plan.
6. Once you execute this strategy based on all different methodologies that you have utilized and put together, you will have valuable insights to see how you have done so far and what else needs to be improved. You will get answers to: Did I mitigate the risks that I thought of before? Did I really address my “bad actors”? If I did, let us repeat and reuse this success for other assets. If I did not, what did I miss?
Elements like Root Cause Analysis, statistical analysis and reliability distributions… can help you answer the question: What else did we miss?
Defining a strategy should be an evergreen process as part of the continuous improvement cycle. In short, the workflow can be divided into several pillars. At GE Digital, these APM solutions are called Health, Strategy, Integrity, Reliability and Safety.
© GE Digital
What are the different levels of maturity in APM?
In GE Digital’s experience in designing APM solutions and developing APM roadmaps, we have been using the following four categories of maturity as a starting point for their APM journey:
• Reactive Inefficiency is typically when a company is responding to immediate conditions and does not really have a vision so they are not measuring their results in a consistent manner.
• Managed Control is when the vision exists and is communicated, performance measures are established and consistent and process KPI’s drive decisions.
• Strategic Improvement describes an organization whose performance measures are regularly reviewed and improved, the vision is compelling and drives people to action, and decisions are strongly influenced by business objectives.
• Reliability Driven is simply put, world class. This is where performance results are world class benchmarks, vision is copied by competitors and APM decisions are drivenby Value Gain and maximum sustainable Return on Assets.
Which tools are available on the road to Asset Performance Management?
Most organizations already have the basic tools available in place: condition monitoring solutions, vibration sensors, SCADA systems and data storing solutions. The next important step is to have an APM solution that connects all these different tools together and enable the multi-angle view on data and support the relative Strategy, Integrity, Failure Elimination and Health processes.
For example: You want to build an effective risk-based strategy for a complex system. Your software tool really should be able to use the historical data, condition data and maintenance history data at the same time. It should also be able to link all of the potential failures to risks and then highlight what will be the return on investments on the given strategy. Does it make sense to take particular mitigating actions? Are they going to pay back if I change my strategy or do something differently? Is it going to be worth it for an organization? Is it going to reduce the risks and help us get the ROI from these particular activities? Think about your cost and expenditure in the long term, which will be associated with the strategy and then of course, once you identify the relevant way, your tool should be able to implement the recommended risk mitigation strategies directly to all the relevant parties for that execution.
In another example, for Mechanical Integrity, advanced APM tools are capable of utilizing CMMS data in conjunction with Risk Matrix to support API-compliant
Risk Based Inspection (RBI) studies and prioritize the inspections, followed by full inspection management, scheduling, mobile execution and reporting capabilities in order to conduct thickness calculations, remaining useful life calculations and managing Integrity Operating Windows. These activities are typically deployed in seamless integration with CMMS.
The most important requirement for an effective APM tool is to make sure that the tool is an ecosystem that can scale to the size of the organization and seamlessly integrate with third party solutions.
The Internet of Things makes data more available: sensor data, composed data, machine learning, artificial intelligence… How does data change the process and the APM cycle?
Our assets are talking, and we need to listen to them. The amount of sensor data, industrial benchmarks and other content that you have available give you a rich world of data. Sensors on the assets are capable of giving you a rich signal every split second.
But the real question is: what do you want to do with all that data? In order to answer this question, we need a view of how the data can be valuable for us. We need to see the methodology, levels and tools of how we can actually process this data with the relevant decision making, mathematical algorithms, and policies that can make sense out of all the data. If humans would study this data full-time for a year, we would not be able to process even a quarter of it. So having a solution that is able to plug into these data sources, centralize the data and then make sense out of it, that is how the digital transformation angles to asset performance management.
Making sense out of data is in fact visualizing the risks, the business impact of these risks and then allowing you to mitigate these risks and take necessary actions. Visualizing the risks and the current asset condition is the first goal. But the industry needs to think a few steps further: not only to see what risks the assets are currently exposed to but also to have that in conjunction with the historical data to understand if the behavior of the asset is normal. Has something changed? And what do we need to change in the future? Not only to react to the deviation right now but to prevent the deviation from coming up again in one or more years from now. Data can give you that strategic edge. The tools that can process this data, is the output we would expect from these solutions.
What would you recommend to organizations that want to start with asset performance?
Every organization should start by knowing what they need to do and why they want to do it. Then you need to know the steps you need to take.
Many organizations that are starting on the APM journey, start because “everyone else is doing it”. This attitude does not lead to the right results.
For example, you set the goal that you want to improve your availability by two percent by the end of 2023. That will translate into five to seven million dollars of additional revenue for the company. That is a target that you can benchmark, you can track your progress and constantly reflect on it even after 2023. Do you still want to maintain that? Is the change sustainable? Whatever change you make, you want to make sure it is a sustainable one.
Once the target is set, you need to determine the steps you need to take. Know that there are many different ways to achieve that target: training, methodology, sensors, RCM… But how do you decide? Assess the areas requiring improvement by doing a gap analysis, followed by a change readiness assessment. This way, you determine the maturity in each process, function by function. You understand what the gap and deviation is, what potentially could be improved and how ready the team is to actually make a change. That will result in prioritizing and sequencing the activities in a multiple months/years journey. You are essentially building the asset performance management role model.
The key role of Asset Performance Management in sustainability
By making assets more reliable, you minimize and optimize the carbon output. We know we cannot go straight to wind, solar and other renewable energy sources immediately. That is where APM will play a key role: in helping industrial companies get to a lower carbon emission, especially during this hybrid time where we continue to use a lot of the expensive assets that have already been put in place. We are not going to strand all these very expensive assets, we are going to continue to use them for a period of time.
There are many use cases, for example about optimizing operational emissions, monetizing carbon reduction and optimizing inventory effort. All of these require data collection, auditing of that data and operationalizing that data in individual plants, across plants and ultimately in enterprises.
It is not just about the adaptation of new, lower emitting equipment. It is a much larger information and optimization game.
So APM, at its core really, is an expert industrial management system. It encapsulates many years of subject matter expertise in power generation, oil and gas, mining, aviation, and other asset-intensive industries
For example, templates and blueprints are especially important in a world where we see a lot of subject matter experts exit companies and take that experience with them. At GE, there are millions of people-years in experience. They have taken that experience and put it in digital twin systems. There are also algorithms, visualizations and optimization for reliability. That has a very positive effect on decarbonization based upon these million person hours of experience.
When you make industrial assets more reliable, you also optimize them for carbon. For example, the air fuel mixture of an engine. By measuring exactly and precisely the amount that is needed at a point in time relative to conditions, you are able to extract not just more energy out of them but also optimize and minimize carbon emissions. We already do that in cars today. And it is not just a metering of the prime mover, the engine itself, but it is also the balance of plant, all the other assets that are really contributing to that prime mover putting out electricity, extracting energy…
From a mining perspective: extracting resources out of the ground or somewhere else. It is in that way that APM has the foundational information in computational elements that can be leveraged to optimize emissions and lower the overall carbon footprint today. Not tomorrow, but today, during this hybrid time.
APM and OPM
If you look out over the horizon, at the future of APM, it includes something called OPM, or Operations Performance Management. OPM is about optimizing the performance of your systems, including digital twins based on physics, artificial intelligence, computer visioning and sensoring, dynamic optimization, algorithms and data science, and better human-to-machine interface and experience… When you bring in new workers they can easily come up to speed and utilize the processes that you have put in place.
It is not just technology, it is also people and processes. By bringing together these three elements, you can not only achieve a very good APM system, you can also reduce carbon emissions. Ultimately, an APM and decarbonization expert system leads to an implementation of an autonomous plant which will be able to sense conditions and change to optimize energy resource needs while absolutely minimizing, if not eliminating carbon emissions.
By optimizing a plant, you can optimize not just reliability but also your carbon footprint and emissions today. It is all about hitting this golden badge again and again. ■
WITH THANKS TO: Yerem Davtyan, Senior Manager Digital Solution Architecture EMEA/APAC, GE Digital
Warren Ross, Senior Director Product Management, APM Product Center, GE Digital.
This article was created with the cooperation of GE Digital.
