Everything You Need to Know about Asset Performanc...

APM defined

What is Asset Performance Management (APM)?

In the industrial world, Asset Performance Management (APM) is a designation for processes that companies use to monitor, assess, maintain, and fund the equipment (assets) that are needed to run their business.  While the term APM has been used more explicitly in the past two decades, the processes that define asset performance management have been used for much longer than that.

As technology associated with digital controls, desktop computers, and resulting software started to mature in the late 90s, the term Asset Performance Management started to be associated with software and service solutions designed to help optimize the performance of a customer’s assets. 

Meridium Inc. (a software company that was acquired by GE in 2016) pioneered the use of the term APM and the development of enterprise-level APM solutions.  APM software focuses on connecting disparate data sources and, using a collection of analytic techniques, including advanced predictive analytics, turns data into actionable insights while fostering collaboration and knowledge-management across the organization.

Asset Performance Management is more than technology. It’s a unified strategy that assists people, processes, and systems to work together toward sustained operational excellence. It’s no simple task to achieve, but we’ve seen customers drive transformational value when they’re able to investment in enterprise level APM solutions that helps them to see the organizational changes required (such as APM COEs) to enable the process changes across functional teams and enable a continuous improvement culture.

Asset Performance Management is more than technology. It’s a unified strategy that assists people, processes, and systems to work together toward sustained operational excellence.

According to the Verdantix Green Quadrant for Asset Performance Management Solutions 2020, demand for APM software has increased significantly since it was first launched in the late 1990s. The last five years in particular have witnessed an acceleration in corporate investment. Verdantix analysis has found that global spending across all industries on APM software, content and related services reached $2.3 billion in 2019.

Why should you implement Asset Performance Management?

Benefits of APM

Asset performance management is a proven approach to reducing unplanned downtime, decreasing maintenance costs, and reducing EH&S risks. Implementing an effective APM strategy is more than installing a series of sensors or point software solutions that monitor and track your systems and assets. APM software provides the most value for companies when providing an integrated, connected enterprise solution that enables asset-intensive organizations to bring disparate data sources together to find new trends and insights that can help enable safer, more reliable operations while facilitating optimal performance at a lower sustainable cost.

APM uses data management, pattern recognition, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to make asset-centric organizations more productive, improving asset availability while reducing operational costs and risks. Imagine getting ahead of failure and unifying the enterprise through data intelligence and visibility.

Many plants / facilities in operation today are still using a variety of individual software solutions that have been amassed over a number of years in an attempt to address reactive maintenance practices and work more toward condition-based maintenance.  The challenge with this situation is lack of integration between such a collection of tools to find insights that cannot be found looking at different tools. 

If this is your primary approach to managing production assets, you are likely not achieving the right balance of asset cost, availability, and risk management for your operations.  While the exact figure varies by industry, unplanned downtime often costs a business 10X the cost of planned maintenance because of the disruption to the business and lost production.  It’s about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) impacts!

Industrial organizations invest in an integrated APM solution to find the “connected themes and opportunities” to reduce unplanned downtime, increase asset availability, minimize maintenance costs, and reduce risk of failure for critical and so-called “non-critical” assets.

Key components

Analytics Drive Deeper Insights for APM

Highly effective APM software solutions are driven by analytics (diagnostic, descriptive, and predictive) and rooted in integrated business work processes. These analytics contextualize data to create actionable information by looking across multiple sites to find patterns and opportunities for improvements.

APM with diagnostic and descriptive analytics helps you answer questions such as:

• How critical is this asset?
• What is the history of this asset, and what is its current health?
• In what ways can this asset fail, how can I mitigate the risk of failure, and at what cost?
• What would be the consequences of this asset’s failure on my business?
• What action should be taken now to prevent failure?
• What should be our overall strategy for this asset to optimize business objectives?
• How can I more efficiently manage and maintain less critical assets so they don’t become a problem in the future?

Asset Monitoring is only the start.  To truly drive out higher asset availability, and even to uncover asset reliability issues (aka design), you should be employing Digital Twins. APM software can leverage Digital Twin models to detect very subtle indicators of potential failure.

The Digital Twin is a computer model of how the equipment should operate. A statistically significant deviation in how the equipment is actually operating is a warning sign of potential downtime. These analytical techniques can help companies move from break-fix and time-based maintenance to condition-based strategies which simultaneously eliminate unnecessary maintenance and improve equipment reliability.

Using Digital Twin technology, Asset Performance Management software helps organizations rapidly reduce cost and risk from industrial reliability and maintenance work processes

Accelerating Digital Transformation

Cutting-edge data science

Undergoing digital transformation isn’t quick or easy, but with proven technology solutions like APM, your organization can gain a significant competitive edge.

As one of the only companies in the world that designs, builds, connects, operates, maintains, and services critical industrial assets – the entire lifecycle of equipment – we at GE Digital are uniquely positioned to offer the most comprehensive APM solution in the market: GE has decades of deep-domain equipment expertise and cutting-edge data science and analytics technology. We’ve used the unique know-how and industrial expertise that helped us build our own $50B services business as a foundation of our APM solution.

Our Asset Performance Management (APM) software helps customers monitor key pieces health indicators that help determine asset health and predictive maintenance requirements. APM software applications help producers get more detailed monitoring of their entire processes. By maximizing overall health and reliability of assets, industrial companies can operate more efficiently and reduce costs over time.

GE Digital’s APM rich functional solutions for Health, Reliability, Integrity and Strategy are available as a SaaS offering, a traditional on-premises deployment and as a Managed Services offering for customer outcomes. The solution works across all equipment, all OEMs, and all industries, across the plant, and across the fleet.  Our APM solution incorporates a rich catalog of Content to get customers “faster time to live” including asset monitoring analytics, predicative analytic Digital Twins, and business process workflows.

For decades, we’ve been aligning our financial incentives with those of our customers through long-term service agreements on the industrial equipment we sell, from aircraft engines to combustion turbines. The tools and techniques we’ve developed are unparalleled and can help companies balance the traditionally competing priorities of reducing costs, improving availability, and managing risk.

Are you ready to make your operation safer and more reliable while helping to ensure optimal performance at a lower sustainable cost? If you’d like to see our APM solutions in action contact us or view our online demo. I encourage you to see asset performance management software in action.

Steve Deskevich

Vice President Digital Product Management, Power Generation and Oil & Gas GE Digital

Steve has over 37 years’ experience in the industrial sector, including 28 years at a major utility in the US, several years as a software product management leader and five years within GE Digital. He has served in roles spanning reliability engineering, technology strategy development/execution and technology product management in asset, operations and reliability management.