An Enterprise Asset Management System (EAM) can be of immense value for an asset-intensive business. Best-of-breed EAM’s Infor EAM and IBM Maximo offer modules to address every aspect of your operations, starting with asset and resource management and including maintenance, health & safety, procurement, inventory control and supply chain management.

Image source: Progressive TSL

The Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is the core element of both Infor EAM and IBM Maximo.  This suite of modules can improve overall efficiencies and increase asset performance through optimised maintenance functions.

Consider three approaches to maintenance

• Reactive or Corrective Maintenance – waiting until the asset starts to fail and is underperforming. By this stage, it needs fixing immediately, it can often come with little warning and sometimes can mean downtime (loss of production) while the asset is repaired.
• Preventive Maintenance – regular maintenance after a specific period, days of use etc. to ensure that they do not fail – this can lead to unnecessary and costly over-maintenance.
• Predictive Maintenance – use key parameters to estimate when an asset may start to fail, giving greater control to plan; PO’s for parts and work orders to plan resources to maintain the asset - all in advance of an imminent failure that could become an issue.

Getting the Maintenance Balance Right

Graph showing the right balance of asset management to ensure optimum cost and efficiency savings.

Finding the right balance between under maintaining and over maintaining assets can have a considerable impact on productivity. The maintenance modules (CMMS) within best of breed EAM systems like Infor EAM or IBM Maximo enable you to introduce a robust maintenance strategy that gets this balance right. An optimised maintenance strategy will:

• Minimise maintenance costs
• Minimise downtime
• Enable more efficient workforce planning
• Maximise performance

Your EAM platform can gather key data indicating the asset’s health and performance from; SCADA, and PLC systems and IoT enabled assets. EAM functions like RBI (Risk-Based Inspection) and RCM (Reliability Centred Maintenance) can analyse this data to predict and plan maintenance and automatically generate service requests and raise work orders. 

How Infor EAM and IBM Maximo supports an optimised maintenance strategy

• Prioritise maintenance work based on sensor information
• Automatically raise purchase orders and generate work orders
• Break down large work orders into projects with smaller tasks and identify the percentage of the project completed
• Track assets and asset output – for servicing and maintenance planning
• Link up all aspects of a platform EAM – procurement, supply chain, materials and maintenance management to give a company-wide overview
• Full integration with your Finance system, e.g. Infor SunSystems
• Manage your asset lifecycle from commissioning to End of Life
• Store and record maintenance data, allowing analysis and evidence of compliance
• Generate reliability surveys to determine the output of an asset and predict future maintenance intervals
• Manage your vendor contracts with comprehensive contract management support for purchase, lease, rental, warranty, rate, master, blanket and user-defined contracts.
• Define service offerings and establish service level agreements (SLAs) to help align service levels with business objectives. 

Developing an intelligent maintenance plan

Choosing to manage maintenance through the CMMS modules of your EAM system provides greater holistic control over your business processes. It allows for all your data (historical and current) to be stored in one place and accessed across the business. Whether you are in the office, out on a rig, or travelling between sites, you can keep track of your maintenance plan, order parts and apportion resources for fixes and inspections – all from one device.

The future of predictive maintenance

The newer generation of assets will have in-built sensors and some industries are now becoming fully IoT enabled; these can be configured to record vast amounts of data from an asset. The concept behind IoT is nothing that new in maintenance – for decades, SCADA has taken a similar approach to IoT.  SCADA uses sensors embedded in assets to collect data from equipment – including pressures, temperatures, atmospheric conditions, load, vibration etc. However, we are finding IoT opens up some opportunities for real-time data collection and analytics of trends in performance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology such as IBM’s Watson and Infor’s Coleman and Business Intelligence tools such as Infor’s Birst bring even more exciting opportunities.  Using these tools to run simulation models based on what-if scenarios introduces another level of intelligence into future predictive maintenance strategies, collaborating with Digital Twins.

Here at Progressive TSL, we look forward to working with our partners at Infor and IBM to develop the next generation of maintenance management incorporating emerging technologies such as IoT and AI into our EAM solutions.  The ultimate goal being for Progressive’s clients to reap the benefits of this new technology to maximise the productivity and performance of their operations.

EAM as part of an ISO 55000 strategy

Over the coming years, we expect the asset management framework defined by ISO 55000 to become more widely adopted within asset-intensive industries. A key outcome of this is to ‘Connect Top Management decisions to the Asset base’. ISO 55000 defines the importance of an ‘Enterprise Asset Management’ system as a critical element of this framework. To achieve this; Infor EAM & IBM Maximo, as standard, support the processes and policies that form an effective Asset Management System, as defined in ISO 55000.

Want to know how EAM can revolutionise your maintenance management strategy?

Get in touch with Progressive TSL. Our large team of EAM consultants have vast experience and expertise of implementing maintenance strategies using Infor EAM and IBM Maximo across a range of asset-intensive industries including oil and gas, renewable energy, construction, mining and engineering. Progressive TSL is also an Infor Gold Channel Partner and an IBM Silver Business Partner; when it comes to asset management, our specialist knowledge is second to none.