Asset Optimization -- What is that?

These days the term Asset Optimization is quite trendy. It is being used by many industries.

But what exactly the word Optimization means?

Asset Optimization has four parts, which are the following:

1. The anticipation of the future failure time. This is generally done through the principles of Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) simply because most failures (around 90%) in the plant are random in nature. The focus is on the right interpretation and diagnosis of signals that appropriately track the degradation of equipment or component functions.
2. Prognosis computation. That is to tell when a maintenance intervention is needed. But it is not easy to do so. The output is subsequently used to improve maintenance diagnosis and schedule maintenance activities within productivity and budget constraints.
3. Prolong and influence the degradation process of each component. This is by far the most difficult step of the optimization process.
4. Contain maintenance costs. Needless to mention that without achieving excellence in the above three parts of the process, containing or reducing the cost of maintenance would remain a pipe dream.