Tapping Collective Maintenance Wisdom - An EAM Route?
I recently got a chance to go through an interestingly titled research report from Bill Polk of AMR going by the headline "Asset Management Algebra: EAM = ROI". In these times of increasingly deficient attention-spans, reading a 2-pager is always better than reading a 20-pager with authors belaboring the same point in multiple ways.
Apart from the usual benefits of EAM (ROCE, efficiency improvements, structured information etc) and its new found importance (movement from tactical to strategic), an interesting point which I haven't come across in many other places was about "Capturing and preserving data from an aging workforce". While implementing EAM systems, we typically think of labor management (thru the EAM app or via a little help from more high brow "Workforce Management Systems or WFMs") as a way to capture skills of the maintenance personnel thus making sure the right party is assigned to the right work order.
Here Bill comes up with a different perspective on the importance of EAM & the skills registry part of the implementation. In his words "Many manufacturing assets - heavy assets, in particular - are designed to run for decades. In fact many companies' assets are designed and built by one generation and then operated and maintained by the next. With key information oftentimes found in the heads or desks of an aging workforce, in addition to the increase in maintenance outsourcing, it’s essential to have easily-accessible central repositories of data"
This is clearly an angle we haven’t heard from our clients yet. You may wonder whether we are getting into the realm of Knowledge Management here as against plain old EAM. That may be the case and the challenge would be in capturing unstructured information gleaned over years of maintenance experience which is asset-specific, location-specific and most importantly person-specific into a structured database as part of an EAM implementation, rather than consign it in some kind of free-form text. For industries with longer asset life cycles (say an electric utility or a nuclear power plant), it may be worth the additional effort.
Elsewhere, Bill also outlines very crisply the key benefit metrics (like reduction of emergency repairs or no. of maintenance incidents prevented). Like any other cost-reduction application (say, indirect spend or HR), its actually possible to create a case for self-funding EAM, which just requires a 6-month wait period before the first set of improvements begin to save money for maintenance managers to start planning for more high-end usages like instrumentation integration real-time or asset health dashboards, which work on a near real-time basis.
Where I am a little skeptical is the fast-case implementation scenario Bill refers to, of 30-60 days lead times for vanilla implementations. Perhaps I’m tempered by the fact that Infosys plays almost exclusively in the Fortune-1000 or Global2K client base where all fast cases could end up being lost cases more often than otherwise. My feeling is that such implementations would be largely in the realm of a capability demonstration PoCs. As Bill himself says elsewhere, the real power of the software can only be harnessed when the EAM workflows go beyond the boundaries of one package and start looking at all the cost elements that impacts asset optimization. That covers ERP, plant systems and any niche applications (MRO procurement, inventory management, workforce management) which can contribute to overall goals of an EAM implementation. We can then say that EAM Algebra is truly the sum of parts being larger than the whole.
Comments
Gopi,
I agree with Bill on the skills registry part, which is the most precious one in any maintenance organization. Sources for this could be from the Maintenance manuals provided by the asset manufacturer, asset maintenance history that is recorded and available in the system (if there was one already existing), plant engineers' diary, technicians' individual hand books (which is least shared by them - personally I had got more details in this which never gets captured in maintenance history of the asset) and other generic opinion or known fact that is well known among maintenance and / or operations team but never documented properly (Say known fact, gut feeling!!!, seasonal behaviours etc....). If we are able to collect and tag all these during our implementation we should be fairly decent in capturing and preserving the data from the available sources.
Rgds,
Senthil.
Posted by: Senthil | November 3, 2009 05:53 AM