Planning for business disruptions is the new business as usual. To get ahead in a rapidly shifting environment, industrial businesses are leaning more on integrating operational technology (OT) with IT data, which allows them to move from time-based to predictive maintenance, monitoring and management. But collecting and deriving insights from data that resides across disparate applications, legacy databases, machines, sensors and other sources is a complex affair. In fact, two-thirds of business data remains unleveraged. If companies can’t turn their data into value, it’s useless.
This is where intelligent asset management (IAM) comes in.
Announced today at MaximoWorld, IBM’s intelligent asset management brings together powerful solution suites for asset management, facilities management and environmental intelligence in one integrated place. It empowers the entire organization, from the C-suite to the frontline and all along the supply chain, to make more informed, predictive decisions across key operational and functional arenas. With IAM, all players can:
- Monitor and measure operations for a 360-degree view of internal and external data, using asset and sustainability performance management capabilities to help balance net income with net-zero objectives.
- Manage assets, infrastructure and resources to optimize and prioritize activities that improve the bottom line, including new integrations between Maximo and TRIRIGA to merge best practices across property, plant and equipment.
- Improve product and service quality with AI and next-gen technologies that increase customer satisfaction and cost control with intuitive visual inspection and occupancy experience solutions.
IAM breaks down the walls between these traditionally siloed data sets through a holistic approach to asset management, allowing organizations to untangle their data and bring sustainability and resiliency into their business. Here are just a few examples of how clients are utilizing IAM today.
Creating an end-to-end digital utility
One example is the New York Power Authority (NYPA). The NYPA, already the largest state public power organization in the U.S., seeks to become the nation’s first fully digital public power utility. This ambitious goal is part of the organization’s VISION2030 strategic plan, which provides a roadmap for transforming the state’s energy infrastructure to a clean, reliable, resilient and affordable system over the next decade.
To help unify its asset management system and integrate its Fleet Department, the NYPA turned to IBM Maximo®. The NYPA already uses several Maximo solutions — including the Assets, Inventory, Planning, Preventive Maintenance and Work Order modules — to help manage its generation and transmission operations. But its Fleet Department still relied on separate, standalone software for fleet management, preventing cross-organizational visibility into vehicle information. With the Maximo for Transportation solution, the Fleet Department is helping to ensure optimal management of approximately 1,600 NYPA vehicles. Using this central source reduces operational downtime and cuts costs while boosting worker productivity. It also supports the NYPA’s clean energy goals to decarbonize New York State.
Find out how NYPA is advancing its climate changes goals with IBM Maximo.
Harnessing weather predictions to deliver power across India
Leading companies are also turning to IAM solutions to become more responsive to changes and to ensure business continuity. They are leveraging tools like the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, which provides advanced analytics to plan for and respond to disruptive weather events and avoid outages.
In recent years, India has made massive strides in ensuring that every electricity-consuming entity has access to the power they need. But the country struggled when it came to the reliability and efficiency of these services. Government officials had to calculate energy predictions manually using spreadsheets that could only consider historical energy usage. This process left much room for inefficiencies, waste, and financial loss. Officials needed a new way to understand all the factors that impact demand.
Delhi-based Mercados EMI, a leading consultancy firm that specializes in solving energy sector challenges, worked with IBM to create an AI-based demand forecasting solution to help address this problem. The model combined historical demand data with weather pattern information from The Weather Company’s History on Demand data package, which enabled officials to accurately predict when and where energy would be consumed based on environmental conditions. With this data, Mercados could provide utilities with demand forecasts with up to 98.2% accuracy rate to reduce the chances of outage and optimize their costs when it came to buying capacity. This allowed officials to make better overall decisions to balance supply, demand and costs to the consumers.
Keeping cities safe and sustainable with AI and IoT
As the economics of leveraging AI and monitoring assets remotely become more favorable than large supervisory systems, ensuring this lightweight infrastructure can also provide rapid insights from real-time situation data becomes critical. This challenge is particularly pronounced when it comes to environmental issues, where connecting city systems and infrastructure resources with real-time awareness can make all the difference.
Take Melbourne, Australia as an example. Due to climate change, Melbourne is experiencing more extreme weather such as severe rainfall events. In 2018, over 50 mm (2 in.) of rain fell in 15 minutes, resulting in flash floods and widespread power outages.
To help provide protection against flooding, the city’s water management utility, Melbourne Water, operates a vast drainage network that includes approximately 4,000 pits and grates. To function properly, the stormwater drainage system requires regular inspection and maintenance, which in turn requires thousands of hours of manpower every year, often executed during the most dangerous conditions.
That is why Melbourne water turned to AI-powered visual inspection technology in the IBM Maximo Application Suite. This allowed them to use cameras to capture real-time information about their stormwater system, then leverage AI to analyze the situation and detect blockages. And because Maximo allows easy integration between management, monitoring and maintenance data and applications, crews can focus on the areas that pose the most risk to Melbourne and its citizens.
Learn how Melbourne water improved stormwater management with IBM Maximo solutions
We hope to see you at MaximoWorld 2022 in Austin, TX. Learn more by visiting Maximo booth #303 and TRIRIGA booth #112.