New asset management solutions are elevating plant productivity and performance

Industrial maintenance and reliability professionals wanting to optimize the plethora of assets in their care can look to ever-improving enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions, computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), and innovative solution enhancers. Tools like these are empowering decisions and actions that elevate uptime, productivity, and performance to new levels.

Core asset management software

Two software solutions designed to promote maintenance, operations, and reliability excellence are offered by CMMS Data Group (CDG). One helps to improve plant maintenance and reliability, and the other is for improving overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). MVP CMMS (formerly called MVP Plant) and MVP OEE can be used stand-alone, integrated together, or integrated with other solutions.

MVP CMMS innovates by bringing together maintenance and production teams to help increase asset uptime and capacity. MVP OEE, introduced in 2021, seamlessly integrates production line performance tracking with maintenance work management to automate data-driven continuous improvement processes, explains Ruth Hughes, founder and CEO of CMMS Data Group.

For companies seeking fast, affordable deployment of an advanced asset management solution, Maximo AAM is available from Total Resource Management (TRM), an IBM Gold Business Partner. The cloud-based asset management solution comes preloaded with a PM library and condition-based inspections data for over 80 percent of a plant’s common assets, along with a virtual assistant, the TRM OMNI chatbot.

“It is common for organizations to spend extreme sums of money implementing maintenance software that doesn’t actually improve maintenance,” observes John Q. Todd, offering manager at Total Resource Management. “We have solved that issue with our turnkey Maximo AAM solution, which is specifically preconfigured to improve maintenance processes and asset reliability.”

Some “cool stuff” is being added to HxGN EAM from Hexagon (formerly Infor EAM), reports Kevin Price, a VP at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence. Before Infor EAM’s acquisition by Hexagon, Infor was already evolving its product from the silo of EAM to having more asset performance management (APM) features. Now, Hexagon’s engineering-grade capabilities are being incorporated into HxGN EAM.

“We are adding integration touchpoints to things like digital twins, building information models (BIMs), and computer-aided designs coming from our own Hexagon tools,” says Price. “Mobilization is also a priority and by the end of 2022, we will have about 96 percent of our entire EAM solution on a mobile format, beyond the many task-specific apps that we also offer. Our end-of-the-year release, and future releases, will continue where we left off at Infor with our EAM to APM evolution.”

EAM / CMMS investment boosters

To accelerate fault detection and isolation, Artificial Intelligence Prognostic Steering (AIPS) from Andromeda Systems Inc (ASI) can forecast what is going to fail along with where, when, and why it will fail. It also alerts to potential unidentified false alarms and “opportunistic maintenance events” to improve efficiency. AIPS can be used stand-alone in support of existing EAM/CMMS solutions or embedded within an existing EAM/CMMS.

“AIPS has evolved from an automated solution prioritization system to a machine learning (ML) tool able to not only improve fault isolation but also aid in better prognostics, thereby allowing the system to stay mission ready and reducing downtime,” says Laurie Albarino, ASI’s VP of innovative new products.

Asset Twin technology from Itus Digital allows users to build an asset twin “in minutes.” Its Asset Twin Library offers predefined asset strategies and twin models for common industrial asset classes. Its Asset Twin Marketplace, seeded with the Library, enables collaboration between asset operators, OEMs, and service providers to continuously optimize the asset strategies.

One of the biggest challenges in creating a continuous improvement cycle between EAM and APM processes is ensuring asset strategies are fully implemented and governed across maintenance, reliability, and engineering teams, notes Joe Nichols, president of Itus Digital. “Our Asset Twin technology actively manages failure modes in real time and ensures emerging risks such as operational changes, performance degradation, or missed PMs are immediately detected with corrective actions prescribed to all equipment stakeholders,” he adds.

The EAM Library from SwainSmith is what the company’s president, Tracy Smith, affectionately refers to as EAM/CMMS’s best friend. “Off the shelf, an EAM/CMMS solution is powerful but does not come with everything it needs to succeed. The EAM Library provides the missing pieces,” he explains.

By delivering Problem-Failure-Action-Cause codes, naming dictionaries, best practice training, master data conventions, and self-assessment tools to fill the gaps and improve EAM/CMMS performance, the EAM Library helps organizations get the ROI from their EAM/CMMS investment, Smith adds.

This story originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of Plant Services. Subscribe to Plant Services here.

About the Author: Sheila Kennedy

Sheila Kennedy, CMRP, is a professional freelance writer specializing in industrial and technical topics. She established Additive Communications in 2003 to serve software, technology, and service providers in industries such as manufacturing and utilities, and became a contributing editor and Technology Toolbox columnist for Plant Services in 2004. Prior to Additive Communications, she had 11 years of experience implementing industrial information systems. Kennedy earned her B.S. at Purdue University and her MBA at the University of Phoenix. She can be reached at [email protected].