Increasing asset performance and reducing risk with asset information management

Asset Information Management (AIM) is a set of policies, procedures, and tools for managing across the entire lifecycle of an asset.

In asset-intensive industries, asset information plays a critical enabling role in business process improvement initiatives such as Operational Readiness [1] and Excellence [2]. Organizations that execute an effective AIM strategy create an information asset that enables better decision making.

Executives should consider whether their organization is treating its asset information as a strategic asset. Failing to do so may lead to increased operational risks and increased costs amounting to 1-3% of project capital expenditures and 2-4% of operational expenditures over the assets’ life.

AIM is a Strategic Solution for Asset-Intensive Organizations

Operational Readiness, Excellence and Risk Management are tightly connected to Asset Management and AIM through the sharing of common operational objectives for the safe, reliable and productive use of physical assets while minimizing operational risks and lifecycle costs.

AIM has become a strategic management solution in asset-intensive organizations as it improves decision making by getting the right information to the right person at the right time for all stakeholders in the asset lifecycle.

Organizations that adopt and execute an effective AIM strategy are able to gain competitive advantage to address critical issues such as regulatory compliance, safety, an aging workforce, capital project risk, and asset reliability and efficiency.

Poor AIM Practices Jeopardize Operational Performance and Increase Operational Risks

Poor AIM practices adversely impact an organization’s ability to effectively manage its physical assets. Organizations may unwittingly make operational decisions based on insufficient, incorrect, and outdated asset information and fail to fully identify and consider operational risks and opportunities for operational improvement.

Several widespread operational challenges are particularly exacerbated by poor AIM practices:
Capital Project and Turnaround Delays: Schedule compliance is adversely impacted by the failure to hand over asset information on a timely basis from engineering to procurement to construction to commissioning and, finally, to operations and maintenance.

EH&S Incidents: Failure to provide operational personnel and contractors with sufficient technical training and complete and accurate asset information for the safe operation, maintenance, decommissioning and disposal of assets is regularly identified as a cause of EH&S incidents.
Inferior Reliability and Availability: Capturing, sharing and analyzing asset information is critical to making operational decisions that directly affect the reliability and availability of an asset.
Low Workforce Productivity: Industry studies consistently show maintenance people spend two or more hours a day looking and waiting for information to complete their work.
Inefficient MRO Supply Chain: Knowing which assets your MRO materials (spare parts) belong to, and what maintenance strategies, plans and procedures belong to those assets is the only reliable way to: 1) forecast the demand for spare parts; 2) prevent the inventory buildup of duplicate and obsolete parts; and 3) develop effective MRO supplier and procurement strategies, at both the enterprise and operational unit levels.
Aging Work and Knowledge Retention: The operational risks inherent in the exit of large numbers of skilled craftsmen are partially due to a failure to effectively “capture” knowledge from experienced workers before they retire
Low Adoption Rate of “Shop-Floor” Systems: Poor information quality and complex systems impede shop floor user adoption and business process compliance

Overcoming the Asset Information Management Challenge

Poor AIM practices may have developed in your organization for a number of reasons.  An awareness of frequently encountered AIM challenges is an essential step in the development and execution of an effective AIM strategy. Challenges that organizations typically encounter include:
Executive Commitment: To unlock the benefits of AIM, an enterprise approach to the deployment of asset information management best practices is required. Without strong executive commitment, it is difficult to bring together disparate stakeholders together to implement an enterprise AIM strategy. 
Lack of Interoperability: Disparate IT systems and processes of Equipment suppliers, engineering partners, and asset owners/operators have disparate IT systems and processes. This impedes the exchange and management of asset information in a manner that meets the specific information needs of asset owners.
Information Handover: Capital project activities generate very large volumes of asset information (primarily master data and documents) that, ultimately, need to be prepared for consumption by the asset owner’s business processes and systems. Without an effective AIM solution to facilitate interoperability, the “handover” of asset information from equipment suppliers and engineering partners is a manual process that is inefficient, error-prone, and costly.
Legacy Information: Business and plant-level systems contain data and documents that often do not accurately reflect your organization’s physical assets. Reasons for this may include: 1) lack of clear responsibility for information quality and a failure to reflect changes to the physical assets in your systems, 2) inheritance of poor data through mergers and acquisitions, and 3) poor data migration practices during the consolidation of multiple system instances or versions or the replacement of legacy systems.
Disparate Systems and Sources of Asset Information: Asset information resides in many unconnected systems and applications. Without an effective AIM solution, it’s improbable that your organization could continually and consistently carry out the management of change processes required for effective master data management.
Management of Change: Most organizations lack well-established processes for managing changes in asset master data and other asset information such as documents as the organization modifies existing assets, and invests in new assets.

A Basic Roadmap for Developing and Executing a Successful AIM Strategy

C-Level executives, with operations, maintenance, IT, engineering, and materials management groups reporting to them are in a unique position to lay the groundwork for a successful AIM implementation. Here are some basic steps for developing an AIM strategy:
Assess your Organization’s AIM Capabilities and Requirements: Begin by forming a small team representing key stakeholders to assess your organization’s strategic asset information needs and its existing capabilities.  This process should address the role AIM plays in critical processes such that enable the company’s strategic compliance, asset management, reliability, productivity, and supply chain initiatives. Compare your needs to your capabilities to determine the right AIM strategy and the right technology solution for your business. Map existing processes and “desired-state” processes for the lifecycle management of your asset information. AIM business process blueprinting is a valuable exercise for organizations that have yet to establish formal AIM practices.

Next, determine the current state (quality, accuracy, completeness) of existing asset information and evaluate AIM solutions that are capable of providing a “health check” on the integrity of your asset information.

If your organization is planning to consolidate ERP instances, upgrade ERP systems, or replace one vendor’s application with another, evaluate AIM vendors on their on their ability to map your organization’s business processes, and validate, migrate and enrich unstructured information and asset master data.

Build a Business Case: Ensure your AIM project objectives are consistent with your business strategy. Set goals and metrics that are easily measured. This will enable you to build broad support for your AIM strategy across all levels of your organization.

 

Choosing the Right AIM Solution

Addressing the asset information needs of operations management; engineering, operations, maintenance and materials management; regulators; contractors; suppliers; engineering partners and other internal and external asset stakeholders requires an AIM solution with proven software and implementation methodologies.  Asset information requirements must be defined among partners and easily collected from internal and external source systems, transformed and quality assured in a staging area, deployed into relevant target systems within your operations environment, delivered in context to end consumers in a visually intuitive way, and continually updated to ensure on-going access to high integrity information.
The Data Model: When evaluating an AIM solution, pay close attention to its data model: enabling your information systems architecture for AIM best practices requires a robust and scalable data model capable of organizing and relating very large amounts of structured and unstructured data at an enterprise level, as well as lower levels of organizational and physical granularity.

Also, check to make sure that the model incorporates “Operations and Maintenance” specific objects (such as maintenance strategies, maintenance plans and procedures, measurement points, equipment, bills of material, and materials, etc.), not just “engineering” objects (such as equipment, equipment attributes, and material).

As opposed to generic data models, data models that incorporate Operations and Maintenance specific objects have out-of-the-box capabilities to accelerate time to value and tend to be much less expensive to implement.

Use a Proven AIM Methodology to Evaluate an AIM Solution: Evaluate and compare core functional capabilities of AIM solutions using a proven AIM methodology. Doing so will ensure that your AIM requirements are evaluated consistently across all potential solutions.
Listed here are some basic AIM requirements, which have been organized for convenience using the NRX AIM methodology.

Define

• Provide a web-based ability (easily accessible by partners) to define the project (set information deliverables, resource and task assignment, audit trail, dashboard and detailed reporting, completion confirmation, etc,) and detailed information requirements.

Collect

• Provide a web-based collaboration portal and standard APIs for collecting and extracting asset information from internal and external sources.
• Unified handling of structured and unstructured data.
• Utilize intelligent information request forms capable of incorporating business rules and data validation.
• Integrated mobile data collection tools for the efficient collection of equipment and materials information (location information, nameplate data and digital images).

Transform

• A staging area, tools and workflow for manipulating, transforming, enriching, and quality assuring structured and unstructured data.

Deploy

• Open architecture for synchronizing data with target business systems (enterprise asset management systems, reliability systems, enterprise content management systems, etc).
• Tools and workflow for preparing a complete set of asset master data for the core business system.
• Composite application type portal-based user interface capable of delivering asset information in the context of the users’ workflow.

Sustain

• Tools and workflow for managing (add, change, delete) asset master data.
• Tools and workflow for managing unstructured content relating to the installation of new equipment and the modification, maintenance, decommissioning, and disposal of installed equipment.

Implementing Your AIM Solution

While the implementation of an AIM solution should follow steps widely used to successfully implement solutions, a few aspects warrant special attention.

Appoint a Strong AIM Champion: Look for individuals with experience in operational areas (engineering, production, maintenance, and engineering projects) of your business that possess a demonstrated ability to energize others and promote and engender organizational change.

Choose a Project: Implement your initial AIM project in a project where goals can be easily defined and results measured. Your project teams may also be able to help you identify a project with pre-existing asset information requirements.

Assemble the Right Team: Choosing the right mix of business and IT people is critical to the success of the project. Representation from the business should include subject matter experts from your capital project, maintenance, operations, engineering, and materials management teams. Representation from your IT group should include at least one individual with plant-level IT experience as well as at least one individual from your information management team.

Select the Right Implementation Partner: Look for an implementation partner with an extensive record of successful AIM projects. Experienced AIM partners possess not only the knowledge and experience to help make the project a success, but also a proven AIM methodology, a data governance framework, and tools to accelerate implement times and the time to value.

Establish Strong Data Governance Policies and Procedures: Treating your asset information as a strategic asset is a multi-dimensional undertaking involving people, processes, and technology. Establish rigorous data quality control policies and procedures. Appoint individuals and assign clear responsibility for data quality. Use integrated software tools to conduct regular audits to measure compliance and ensure ongoing consistent results.

Benefits of an AIM Implementation

A well-designed AIM strategy and the successful deployment of an AIM solution will produce better, faster, more consistent decision making and improved results in operational readiness and excellence. Expected benefits include:

Reduced Operational Risk

• Improved safety and environmental compliance through better training and quick access to mission critical information
• Improved knowledge retention and institutionalized processes to address knowledge capture from highly skilled retirees
• Provide the right information to the right person at the right time to improve decision making and mitigate risks

Reduced Financial Risk

• On schedule on budget delivery, and vertical start-up, for capital projects
• Reduced risk of EH&S incidents
• Increased Workforce Productivity
• Reduce time spent searching for information and improve internal (across functional areas) and external (with suppliers and engineering partners) collaboration
• Increase work management productivity, i.e. wrench time

Reduced Costs

• Lower labour and materials management costs through improved work management and supply chain management processes
• Lower energy costs through increased equipment efficiency
• Reduce information management costs by replacement of ad-hoc manual processes with an automated and programmatic approach to managing asset information
• Increased Revenue
• Accelerated time to full-production in capital projects and faster time to revenue
• Increased reliability and availability

AIM is a strategic enabler of asset safety, performance, and productivity, and plays a key role in making asset information easily accessible for safe and reliable operations. To accelerate operational readiness in capital and data migration projects, and enable operational excellence for existing assets, leading asset-intensive companies are deploying AIM solutions to drive business process improvements and competitive advantage.

NRX is the market leader in Asset Information Management (AIM) and asset master data management (aMDM) solutions. The NRX solution enables operational readiness for capital projects by reducing schedule and cost, data migration complexity, and accelerating time to full production. For operating assets, the solution enables operational excellence through increases in reliability, and maintenance and MRO supply chain efficiency.

NRX Asset Center is purpose built to address asset information management challenges across the entire asset lifecycle. The solution combines data, document, and project management software and methodologies to enable asset owners and engineering companies to define their requirements; manage the data and document collection and transformation process; and easily deploy and sustain asset information.

Footnotes:
[1] Operational Readiness refers to the preparedness, of an organization and its physical assets, for productive use of its assets in a safe, reliable, and efficient manner.
[2] Operational Excellence refers to the management of an organization’s operational areas in a manner that achieves and sustains world-class performance, while upholding its core values and attaining its objectives for safety, reliability and efficiency.