Capitalize on innovation with intelligent asset management

The critical role of asset lifecycle management in an interconnected, autonomous world.

Across every asset-intensive industry — such as energy and utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, and transportation — organizations are challenged with how to maximize asset value throughout their lifecycle during technology, human capital and economic inflection points. To further complicate matters, current technology infrastructure generates more data, which requires effective systems to filter the noise and focus on what matters most.

Asset performance and the quality of an organization’s products and services are impacted by the reliability of the asset or equipment. Reliability is dictated by the consistency of outcomes, which is nearly impossible with applications and data being kept in silos. As a result, the increased need for a more intelligent approach to asset maintenance and management can have a direct impact on customer satisfaction and financial performance. In fact, in a recent Chief Supply Chain Officer study conducted by IBM Institute for Business Value, 47% of the respondents said they’ve adopted new technologies, including automation, as a response to disruption. The journey to reliability is built on the consistent data, workflows and process that asset management and maintenance platforms deliver.

Despite these challenges, your organization’s strategy must constantly evolve to meet customer demands such as increased global commoditization and competition, compliance with industry and government regulations, resilient and sustainable operations, human capital evolutions, health and safety in the workplace, and the reality of higher costs of doing business.

The ability to adapt to change by improving operations can mean the difference between prosperity and survival, asset lifecycle management, driven by a unified strategy that puts data, analytics and automation at its core, and is extensible to incorporate articificial intelligence/machine learning, IoT and even AR technologies, can have a significant impact. With pragmatic strategy in place, you can optimize production and service systems to the asset, resource, and even the activity level. As a result, your business can wield greater control of the complex asset environments necessary for bottom-line results.

AI enhances visibility and drives actionable insights in today’s IT/OT environments.

As you raise the reliance, risk, or cost of corporate assets, you will often see a corresponding rise in management’s interest to maintain control and visibility of these assets. And with cloud, AI and IoT increasingly being integrated into asset operations there are more opportunities than ever to collect, consolidate and analyze asset information to drive more reliable operations.

The amount of data around asset management processes is invaluable, but teams need to be able to easily and quickly analyze the data to make use of it. The real-time access to data about assets, resources, inventory, and costs can lead to an oversaturated view which can make it difficult to focus on the critical assets. And without an intelligent asset management platform designed to help analyzing and understanding asset state it can become an overwhelming task for maintenance, inspections, and reliability teams. For all these reasons and many more, companies are finding that their IT asset management and maintenance process gaps are creating blind-spots that cause outages and impact productivity.

AI has also shown that it plays a critical support role to maintenance leaders and technicians in augmenting their ability to focus on identifying issues sooner and suggesting potential root-causes and fixes across systems. For example; being able to visually inspect gas pipelines, rail tracks, and bridges, and have AI guide technicians increases the speed and safety of their activities, while providing maintenance supervisors real-time visibility into the health of assets in the field. And because AI is there to augment and enhance, not replace physical operators, new insights and existing domain expertise is incorporated in the form of new data to enhance AI models, often without the need for data scientists. Adding AI can improve the ability to avoid unscheduled downtime, improve first-time fix rate, and reduce safety incidents.

How technology can transform your business

Even with integrating IT/OT data to monitor complex and virtualized environments and augmenting knowledge through the use of AI, operations teams must be able to easily adopt new ways of work. Incorporated “consumerized” features like geographic visualization (mapping), chat, and voice-access (NLP) can also help increase workforce efficiency and the reliability of operating assets.

Maximize asset value to transform your business.

There are petabytes of data generated by intelligent, interconnected, and autonomous systems that hold the key for companies to be move faster, reduce bottlenecks, identify risks and enhance productivity. But, according to Gartner (this link resides outside ibm.com), 87% of organizations have low BI and analytics maturity, which means they struggle to unlock the value in their data.

That’s why asset lifecycle management platforms provide organizations a leg up when sifting through siloes of data to find their next process improvements. When combined with AI to provide enhanced insights, you have the potential to improve every function within an organization. With integrated visibility, control and automation across business and technology assets, you can achieve objectives and maximize the value of all assets supporting the operation.

Visibility provides your organization:

• An enterprise-wide view of asset details and processes across the organization
• The ability to respond faster and make better decisions

With better control of assets and asset-related data, your company can:

• Extend asset life, reduce inventory costs and control
• Increase governance and reduce operational risk
• Improve health, safety, and environmental impact

Increased automation allows your business to:

• Build agility and flexibility into operations
• Improve asset use with proactive asset management and consolidation of systems
• Enhance operational capabilities by automating workflow and improving inventory data reliability

Growing revenue through increased asset availability and reliability

Increased asset availability and reliability help improve service delivery and grow revenue. As your organization tunes its supply chains to meet demand, asset and equipment uptime and availability must align to these schedules, especially as asset management has a direct impact on profitability.

Whether a good is a hard asset, such as an engine component, or a service delivered to a customer, top-line revenue can be affected if your company doesn’t deliver. Cost control and efficiencies created by better managing inventory and other support services can affect your bottom-line revenue, too. With EAM software, you can intervene in a timelier fashion and improve productivity, reduce materials use, and decrease the cost of doing business.

Another significant challenge is to effectively balance the lowest operational cost with the utilization loads of your asset portfolios. As a result, many organizations commonly over maintain equipment or overstock equipment and fleets to make sure that they always have the assets they need. Other companies stockpile spares to shorten repair times by eliminating delays. Each of these “insurance policies” comes with high premiums associated with constant upkeep, refurbishment and financial carrying costs that rarely cease.

These strategies can increase, rather than decrease your costs. Using EAM helps you analyze the value of these strategies and help control or eliminate unnecessary redundancies. They can also help reduce your fixed capital investment, contributing positive bottom-line results.

Consider that businesses using a more intelligent approach to asset management see:

To learn more how an EAM solution can improve productivity and reliability while reducing costs in a safe and sustainable way, read the IDC The Business Value of IBM Maximo Report.

For an overview of the report, see the IDC Business Value Snapshot.

From capturing and analyzing data to predictive maintenance.

The IBM Maximo Application Suite helps you make smarter decisions about asset management by augmenting IoT data with powerful insights driven by AI. IBM Maximo provides the capabilities for better managing physical infrastructure assets so you can make better decisions around all aspects of asset management and get insights that deliver ongoing value for your organization.

IBM Maximo Application Suite

IBM Maximo Application Suite combines monitoring, maintenance, and reliability applications into a single integrated platform. With expanded access to CMMS, EAM, asset performance management (APM) and reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) applications, your teams can reach across your business units to unify operations to maintain business continuity, even under rapidly changing or disruptive conditions.

The suite helps analyze asset data with AI to provide insights that help you make better decisions, enhance efficiency, perform preventative maintenance, and maximize investment in physical assets.

Maximo Application Suite offers key capabilities
that include:

An integrated suite
of applications for operations, maintenance, and quality management

Simplified licensing to optimize consumption and cost

Multiple cloud
deployment options for teams of all sizes

A comprehensive view
of your asset lifecycle

The Maximo Application Suite builds on IBM’s decades of leadership in the asset and operations management space, providing a closed-loop model from monitoring asset performance data to enabling prescriptive maintenance actions. It leverages IBM’s deep commitment to data science and AI at enterprise scale, as well as its recognized leadership in IoT platform, hybrid cloud, security and now digital twin technology.

IBM Maximo works for complex industries.

IBM Maximo captures decades of development work in partnership with the world’s largest, most demanding customers who are leaders in complex industries, creating a range of industry-specific solutions for asset-intensive enterprises. Maximo delivers increased integration bringing together both OT data (from sensors, PLCs, DCS, SCADA systems) and IT data (from MES, ERP systems). However, this integration has different impacts on different functions such as operations, engineering, quality, reliability, and maintenance. The result is world-class software options that address the special needs of industries.

Utilities

Provides special capabilities for linear assets, configuration management and crew schedule or dispatching based on geospatial visual management tools. Suitable for transmission and distribution in water and wastewater, gas and electric power.

Oil and gas, mining and metals

Focuses on operational excellence by integrating safety, reliability, compliance and performance into work management. Reduces costs through standardization, collaboration and the adoption of better operational practices.

Life sciences

Helps monitor, track and manage equipment, facilities, mobile and IT-enabled assets. Integrates with IBM Maximo Calibration to manage tools, traceability and management of e-signature and gold standards. Documentation packages help meet complex compliance requirements from the FDA and provide support in validation projects.

Healthcare

Helps manage the complex relationship between facilities and equipment readiness. Tracks and locates critical assets, monitors facility conditions, complies with reporting requirements and integrates with operational health information systems.

Nuclear power

Helps nuclear organizations manage work and asset management regulations through detailed state management, workflows, escalations and e-signature. Suitable for management of activities within stringent regulatory environments due to compliance, health, safety and security.

Transportation

Provides detailed asset configuration management, fuel management, drivers’ logs and bay scheduling tools to help improve the availability and use of critical transportation assets in organizations operating rail, road and air traffic or logistics.

Service providers

Helps manage profitability and SLAs by linking customer service commitments with field teams delivering services. Related service management activities for multiple customers are managed in a single cloud-based deployed instance accessible by an Android or Apple device.

Civil infrastructure

Helps operators safely monitor, manage and maintain infrastructure assets, predict failures, and prioritize repairs using visual inspection, remote monitoring, predictive maintenance and more.

Learn why Maximo is the choice among operations professionals.

Organizations around the world — all with diverse requirements — trust Maximo with their enterprise asset management. Together, with our ecosystem of IBM Business Partners, clients can get the help they need to reduce downtime and costs, unify asset management processes, and optimize maintenance operations. Here are a few of their stories.

Civil infrastructure

Learn how Sund & Baelt is using IBM Maximo to manage, monitor and maintain their infrastructure.

Manufacturing

Watch how Toyota is using IBM Maximo Health and Predict to create a smarter, more digital factory Toyota transforms vehicle quality with AI and analytics

Transportation

See how Downer keeps passengers moving safely, reliably and comfortably with updated, sustainable asset management.

Downer applies predictive maintenance for predictable trains

Energy and utilities

Learn how VPI uses Maximo for common asset, maintenance, safety, regulatory compliance and site uptime management VPI pushes forward on the path to net zero with IBM Maximo software