Changing face of EAM in a competitive 'Carbon emission control' environment
According to a study published by US Energy information administration (EIA), Commercial and Industrial businesses spend more than 80% of their non-labour operating and maintenance budget on energy. If one views this data in conjunction with the statistics that 40% of the fossil fuels are consumed in producing electricity and this is roughly responsible for 40% of the CO2 emissions, one can understand the need to have the assets running in their most efficient zone.
Classically, operations and maintenance engineers focus on keeping the assets running successfully. They plan their maintenance strategies in such a way that their businesses are not impacted because of failure of assets. If you take a generating station for example, any accidental outage will impact production very seriously and it takes more time to get the asset back into normal operation. For eg., when the North east of US plunged into darkness on 14th of August 2003 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_North_America_blackout) , it took 2 full days to regain normalcy. This grid failure which impacted North Eastern, Mid Western US and Parts of Canada was because of an accidental shut down of East lake plant in Ohio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastlake,_Ohio). In a nutshell, one can understand how an unexpected failure of an asset can run havoc.
To ensure safe, sustained operation and maintenance of assets, the primary functionality that is required in eAM packages is the capabaility that enables users to optimally plan and schedule maintenance activities. These packages also have functionalities that facilitate monitoring resource efficiency, enhancing maintenance quality, tracking work history, and recording all maintenance costs. Any EAM package is expected to support these functions.
However, the growing climate change concerns had forced the package vendors to add enriched functionalities around monitoring the actual performance of assets – in terms of operating conditions and efficiency at which the assets are operating there by facilitating formulation of maintenance & replacement planning strategies. The following functionalities are getting added to the EAM packages :
- Energy consumption patterns – Capability to integrate applications with meters or group of meters to capture and monitor the commodity consumption patterns at an individual asset level or at the level required by the asset hierarchy
- Trending based on operational efficiency – Integrating OEM data and algorithms that help monitoring the current asset performance to identify underperforming assets, very early in their lifecycle.
- Enhanced Preventive maintenance strategies – Based on consumption patterns and trending, arrive at periodic or set date based maintenance approaches for assets
- Capability to take qualitative data to asset history – Capability to take engineers’ quantitative (for set parameters) and qualitative inputs at the time of inspection that can be used to decide on maintenance approaches.
- Integration capability with rest of the enterprise - This enables you to strategically monitor resource and cost planning throughout the enterprise. Improvement programmes can be enforced and reviewed to ensure compliance with industry standards by tracking problems through to resolution.
An enterprise needs the above capabilities to collect data, monitor and take action on performance of their assets which is integral to support the organisation’s ‘Staying Green’.
