Infosys-Oracle Blog

With the growing focus on carbon emission restrictions, Generators are forced to have a healthy mix in their portfolio to ensure that their carbon emission is within acceptable limits.  I happened to read a community research conducted by European Commission on ‘World energy, technology and climate policy outlook for 2030’, mentioned that generators will have to invest in other technologies and renewable sources to support solving global CO2 emission problem. With this thrust to have a healthy mix of sources in their portfolio, generators are likely to relook at their portfolio and hence EAM business model that could support them. 

Whilst the current EAM business models are more focussed on offering maintenance support for their physical assets, the focus is shifting to include safety and some specialised functionality, depending on the kind of generation station. For example nuclear plant’s asset management needs some specialised business functions like waste disposal tracking or portfolio optimisation to be incorporated, which may not be the case for a gas fired plant. Similarly if you take wind farms, there is a need to have remote sensing and performance monitoring to be integrated with the EAM business model to ensure that the offshore wind farms are maintained appropriately.

In a nutshell, the view of Generators who are taking up EAM implementation for their generation plants are changing – especially the ones who have different types of generation plants in their portfolio.  In essence, they are looking at the following dimensions as a part of their EAM business model; over and above the fundamental need take care of support maintenance of their physical assets

1. An EAM business model that is homogenous across their portfolio, with capability to add unique functionality to only the plants that need them.
   
2. Focus on Environment, Health & Safety aspects
3. Unique busines functions for supporting specialised assets like Nuclear Plants, Renewable energy plants etc.,
4. Focus on integration with back office & planning systems to ensure that maintenance functions run hand-in-hand with the other business functions in the enterprise.
5. Need to support a new set of Performance and financial measures.