Many businesses today find themselves in complex and unfamiliar territory. They face resource constraints and supply chain issues due to the continued strain of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as growing sustainability challenges. This external pressure shows few signs of easing and supply chain disruptions will continue to interrupt delivery times and trigger supply shortages around the world.
To continue delivering performance, companies need to mitigate their vulnerability across the value chain – and asset performance management has an important role to play.
Simply put, assets are the physical equipment and machinery that a business uses to create value for its customers. Asset performance management systems monitor and adjust the proper functioning of these elements. The smarter these systems are, the less vulnerable assets become and the better CIOs can make all business operations safer, more efficient and sustainable. This intelligence is made possible by the cloud, IoT, big data and AI, provided these digital technologies are connected in the right way.
The opportunity to transform
The vision of fully integrated IT and operations that deliver new insights, inform business decisions, and strategically manage performance has long been an aspiration. The expansion of technological capabilities has now turned this idea into reality. Additionally, the value that businesses stand to lose if they do not leverage this change to digitize their operations is too great to ignore.
The need for businesses to meet increasingly ambitious environmental goals and commitments, such as limiting greenhouse gas emissions and waste across the entire value chain, will only grow in the years to come as consumer and regulatory pressures increase. The pressure on companies to meet their net zero commitments is one of the most obvious reasons why companies should embrace this change. Building an integrated smart asset management system enables better control, as well as increased awareness and visibility of overall environmental impacts, creating a unique capability for CIOs to achieve the sustainability goals of the company.
Challenges
When looking to optimize operations, understanding the performance levels of the various assets a business maintains is a key first step. Everyone involved in operations, at all levels, should have a clear understanding of how the assets they maintain are performing, where they need to improve, and how those assets could be made smarter. There needs to be collaboration between different aspects of IT operations and departments to produce a value-based approach that specifies short, medium, and long-term goals to enable an effective transition to a new world of digital operations.
Ultimately, the move to smarter asset management is all about increasing transparency into the operations and lifecycle of each asset to identify and address risks and opportunities early on. Therefore, integrating IT and operations requires bridging long-standing silos between the two departments. Historically, these two departments barely talk to each other, let alone effectively integrate with business systems, resulting in gaps and standalone solutions in the operational realm. If these “two halves” of a company’s operational brain are not working in concert, increasing core asset intelligence will remain elusive, with isolated data streams and reactive, delayed maintenance capabilities driving costs. higher operating costs.
How to overcome
The main enablers to achieve this level of asset performance are cloud-based services and other digital tools like artificial intelligence (AI) that provide businesses with the visibility and capabilities to standardize and integrate. That said, investing in these tools is often not enough to achieve full integration. Business decisions should be people-driven; they can’t just be technology-driven. For example, ensuring that the entire operational workforce receives the level of attention and focus needed to properly analyze the performance of their assets may require companies and leaders to retrain their employees. on how to properly and accurately analyze the performance of their assets. Seemingly secondary steps like these are crucial to ensuring that all of the various benefits of the new integrated system are fully realized, helping businesses achieve new levels of operational control, efficiency and effectiveness.
Combine the tools we have
While many of the tools and features used in intelligent asset management have been around for a long time, bringing the systems together opens the door and introduces a whole range of features that will set winners and losers apart in the market. This unified view enables a systems approach that identifies the root causes of challenges and provides a new way to solve them. By equipping employees with the skills to use the tools needed to make asset management smarter, companies have the opportunity to build the resilience of their operations for years to come, while creating lasting institutional change throughout their organization. .
