Make your Assets Green, as Dollar is Green
In some of my recent conversations with clients and colleagues, while discussing asset management, we also discussed "green" which was little unusual some time ago in EAM context, but not any longer.
Companies have started talking seriously about reducing carbon emission, saving water and electricity, waste reduction etc for which asset management packages would play significant roles. After all, these "greening" measures would need sensors, automation, control mechanism and dashboards. In order to make use of this entire real time data, focus would be on software applications those can monitor, capture, weave the data together and take decision accordingly.
There is a scope of "green" virtually everywhere - Offices, Datacenters, vehicles, buildings, manufacturing assets etc. At the same time, implementing green is not simple as well, as in many cases it may require design changes, new capital investment and integrating with new control systems. For some of the very old assets, it might not even be feasible also to try converting them to green due to huge investment and return on investment many not be right.
Probably the easier areas to start with are building automation, datacenters and fleet management as some sort of basic automation already exists within these areas. Heavy and manufacturing assets could be next. Manufacturing assets coupled with precision control systems and historian databases can be monitored and controlled remotely to make them intelligent. These intelligent assets would speak about themselves indicating their health and energy consumption pattern, which can be used to make them green.
At the same time, making assets greener would need significant investment initially, and though results would be seen immediately but complete return on investment would take time due to small, but perpetual, savings. So, greening assets should also be seen from a financial sense perspective. Also, I don't think that companies want to make their assets green just because of some social responsibility; it should also make business sense, as the investment is high.
Within Infosys also, we have target of being a carbon neutral company by year 2017.
