Advances in open technologies, fieldbus integration and information technology are extending the reach of enterprise asset management

To many plant-level professionals, the term “asset management” is synonymous with equipment maintenance or field device management. But, to business managers responsible for process manufacturing operations, asset management implies the effective deployment of all assets within their operational domain to meet business objectives. These assets include: plant equipment, energy, raw material, products, people, facilities, instrumentation, automation, information and even time.

Maintenance is certainly one important element of an overall asset management solution set, but maintenance improvements by themselves will not maximize the business performance of the manufacturing asset base. In fact, attempting to optimize plant operations while improving maintenance, without regard to the operational consequences, or vice versa, actually can degrade performance. True business optimization requires a holistic balance of tradeoffs between maintenance and operations—as dictated by the corporate profitability strategy, not by the isolated improvement objectives of either maintenance or operations.

Five years ago or so, balancing requirements of maintenance and operations across the enterprise, affordably, was more of a vision than a reality. Today, serviceoriented architectures, systems integration standards, high-speed networking and numerous other technologies have advanced to a new level of performance and economy, making platforms that unify maintenance, plant floor, business and customer systems a reality.

Balancing availability and utilization
Maintenance functions typically strive to maximize asset availability while the operations functions strive for maximum asset utilization. Although there are no industry-standard definitions, asset availability often is represented by the percentage of time the plant asset base is available for operating over any given period of time, and as the percentage of total output from an asset base divided by the theoretical maximum output over a period of time. Because it is impossible for a refinery to be 100% available and 100%

utilized simultaneously, the only way to manage assets from a business perspective is to manage both holistically, according to the business measures such as plant profitability. Asset performance management (APM) is the holistic approach that has emerged to describe the practice of balancing availability and utilization around business performance.

APM includes what traditionally has been known as enterprise asset management (EAM), but that is only part of it. Although the initial EAM vision did indeed seek to bring together business and operations enterprise functions, in practice, it has focused primarily on optimizing availability. Traditional EAM tactics for optimizing availability have included...(Read whole article)