Asset Management Digital Transformation
Many people believe that Digital Transformation is directly related to digital technologies. Well It is, but indirectly. Digital Transformation is about transforming your business processes to be aligned or take advantage of the digital technologies of today providing your organization with a more effective and efficient management system.
Business processes are considered the foundations for any digital transformation project. If the foundations are not solid your digital transformation project will fall or better fail. If you do not have any processes or if your processes are poor, then the end result will be poor. It is highly recommended that before you jump on the Digital Transformation bandwagon and start charging towards digital transforming everything you find in front you, ensure first that you have effective and efficient processes.
In the Digital Transformation of an Asset Management System (AMS), we are lucky to have the ISO55000 Asset Management Standard as our foundation for building our processes. Based on the standard, Asset Management, is the combination of processes and data required to manage, monitor and maintain an organization’s Assets lifecycle from procurement to disposal, in the most cost-effective manner. The standard provides guidelines for organizing our operations towards effective and efficient asset management. It guides us towards formulating and implementing an AMS Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Quality Manual where the complete asset lifecycle of every single stage of your assets “life” is recorded, processed, monitored and evaluated.
So how do we go about towards digital transforming our Asset Management System? The first step involves the evaluation of your current processes against the AMS standard and best practices producing a gap analysis. The ISO55000 standard will provide you with guidelines for setting policies, objectives and strategies. It helps you formulate a structured portfolio of your assets and assigning roles and responsibilities for each member of your organization related to Assets. It requires you to maintain contractual agreement processes, support infrastructure, risk management which includes plans, processes and procedures. All of these, according to the standard, must be implemented and followed with integrity, regular audit with monitoring and control mechanisms ensuring performance management and continuous improvement.
Note that any standard, however sophisticated, is a collection of clauses that should be used as guidelines. When evaluating current processes and procedures you need to consider, in addition to the ISO standard, industry specific best practices. It is therefore important that the team that helps you through the digital transformation of your AMS must not only be experts in the standard but must have knowledge and experience in implementing AMS in your specific industry. Also during the evaluation process, you must consider all the stages of an Asset lifecycle including all data requirements at each step of the life cycle and the interdependency between them. A typical lifecycle will cover acquisition, procurement, data management, configuration management, Fault and incident reporting, downtime, performance, disposal and risk management.
When defining the information / data required for your AMS you need to take into consideration the availability and cost of retrieving and maintaining quality data. Garbage in Garbage out we say in IT. You need to consider whether the information to incorporate is available, it is in good quality, the cost to retrieve it will have a high benefit and that the data collected can be effectively be maintained. You need to take into consideration what are the minimum information required to monitor and control your Asset Performance. For instance, you need consider data and processing that will give you asset condition, failure, downtime, maintenance costs and risks per type and groups of Assets. Once you have these in place you need to identify the reports and KPIs you require that will help you monitor the performance of your assets, allowing you to apply improvements based on suggestions.
As Asset Management is directly related to Facilities Management (FM) you will need to evaluate your processes against FM processes. These should include processes such as incident logging, corrective and preventive maintenance, contract management and material management. The result will be the Gap Analysis defining what processes, procedures and data structure must be accommodated in your current procedures in order to effectively and efficiently manage your AMS operations.
The second step in your digital transformation project in to apply the gaps identified to your current processes and information maintained, formulating your AMS SOP quality manual for your organization. Before you apply the gaps identified you need to ensure that your current IT systems will support your revised AMS SOP quality manual. So the third step in your Asset Management Digital Transformation project is to perform an audit of the current information systems to enhance your processes and information management based on the gaps identified. This step should cover all the processes in your revised AMS and identify gaps in your IT systems. You then need to consolidate the technologies in a map showing which technology satisfies which process and data requirements. You eliminate any duplicate technologies and you start connecting the technologies to form the ideal system environment.
There are a number of digital technologies out there that will digital transform our AMS. We can group these digital technologies available today in six categories (a) process and data management systems (b) Mobility (c) Interfacing (d) Graphical Computer Aided (e) Business intelligence (f) Artificial intelligence digital systems.
The first category covers software applications that allow you to manage your AMS processes and data information. These are applications that include functions to manage your procurement, acquisition, configuration management, maintenance history, performance evaluation and disposal processes. It addition they manage your maintenance operations processes including help desk, work order management, corrective maintenance, planning of preventive maintenance, contract management, material management and cost management. Such systems are usually referred as Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) or Computer Aided Facilities Management (CAFM) Systems.
Coupled with a CAFM / CMMS systes are digital technologies that allows you to take advantage of mobile devices such as phones and tablets. Such technologies take the form of mobile applications that allow you to transform your operations on site where technicians and supervisors will be able to tag assets, record new assets, manage any asset maintenance work, review asset history and evaluate performance on-line from the field, reducing costs and increasing productivity.
Interfacing digital technologies are technologies which allow you to interact with intelligence assets and in real time receiving information about their status, alerts, meter readings as well as manage the equipment remotely. These include Building Management Systems (BMS) and Internet of things (IoT) sensors which connect to a device and exchange information with related control platforms.
Such systems also integrate with CMMS / CAFM systems receiving alerts and meter reading information automatically spawning specific corrective or preventive maintenance action.
Next category is the Graphical / Computer Aided digital technologies. These digital technologies are further subdivided into 2D, 3D and GIS technologies. 2D digital technologies are technologies which allow you to map your asset and maintenance data onto a 2 dimensional model such AutoCAD. With these technologies you will be able to manage your space, see where your assets are physically located and associated with different forms of maintenance work effecting the operation of your assets. 3D type of technologies are technologies such Building Information Modelling (BIM) which allow you to map your assets and maintenance work into a 3D model. The big difference with the 2D model is that the 3D technologies will extend the visualization of your information to assets or systems which are not visible such within walls or false ceilings and work through the whole building to trace a problem. GIS type of systems are digital technologies which map your AMS information to a Geo map view such as Google maps or ESRI maps. GIS technologies allow you to visualize your AMS data a map view instead from an application window.
Business Intelligence (BI) digital systems are applications which allow you to transform information into meaningful knowledge. Technologies like CMMS / CAFM, BMS and IoT sensors produce vast amount of data which not all of these data are useful and it is difficult for the human brain to process and produce meaningful information. BI take the raw data produced from these systems, organizes them into information silos and converts them to knowledge using best industry practices computer algorithms. BI tools have advance dashboard tools that allows you to view critical information alerts suggesting specific action. Such systems include Enterprise Sustainability Platforms (ESP) complementing AMS information with energy management utilization.
Under BI technologies we can include Digital Twins technology. This technology elevates AMS to another perspective by providing virtual access to your physical equipment, operating in a building's infrastructure through your workstation. This digital technology uses IoT sensors and BMS integration technology creating a digital copy of your Mechanical, Electrical and / or plumbing (MEP) equipment on your server / workstation bridging your physical asset with virtual digital copy allowing you to gather real-time data about your MEP assets and systems in real time and make appropriate decisions.
Artificial Intelligence digital technologies for Asset Management are technologies that use machine learning and high computational models. They process knowledge from previous history records, providing suggestion on possible action for improving the performance of your Assets. The technology utilizes data from CAFM / CMMS, IoT sensors, BMS and BI systems building models of knowledge based on the operational performance of your assets. AI can be used to identify patters providing predictive information for your assets. It “learns” from the process updating its knowledge improving the decision making process and suggestions put forward as the volume of data retrieved increases.
The results of the above steps are your Asset Management Digital Transformation road map covering the recommended digital technologies you need to implement, outlining how these technologies improve the productivity and quality of your processes and data.
Everyone wants to use the greatest and latest technologies in the market. Perhaps the number one reason of why digital transformation projects fail is because we try to implement all technologies identified in road map all at once. The road map should identify the cost effectiveness of every one of the technologies identified so that we implement the most important technologies for the efficient and effectiveness or your AMS. In addition, the road map should include a feasible plan, digitally transforming our AMS into phases.
The second reason of failure in such projects is responsibility and change fear. All personnel directly and indirectly involved in your AMS must be informed of the change that is about to happen, how will it affect them, your organization and the environment, allocating the appropriate roles and responsibilities. A change management plan must therefore be included in your road map including extensive training to your personnel before the digital technologies are implemented.
We need to walk first before we run. Trying the big bang approach in implementing digital technologies usually ends up in a big failure. Every one of the six digital technologies categories outlined above have a hierarchical dependency relation. That is before you move to a more advance technology category you need to have in place the previous and so on. Each level has its own dependency to processes and data availability. You need to ensure that before you incorporate more sophisticated digital technologies the required processes / data for each technology are in place in both quantitate and qualitative respect. Finally, procuring, implementing and maintaining digital technologies is an expensive process. You need to ensure that the benefits you will be receiving for each digital technology justifies the financial and resources investment you require to implement, operate and maintain them.
Andreas Hadjioannou
Virtual IT