What Is Asset Performance Management?
Asset Performance Management (APM) is an asset management methodology used by asset intensive industries to maximize asset reliability, availability, and utilization of physical assets. According to Gartner, APM uses a combination of data capture, integration, visualization, and analytics to manage asset reliability. Overall, APM is applicable throughout the asset lifecycle, including investment analysis, design, construction, startup, operations, life extension, and decommissioning. Through each of those asset stages, APM is the cross section of process, people, and technology to ensure the asset is properly managed from an investment perspective.
Regarding technology, APM employs a variety of different software packages, ranging from collecting the right data, to organizing or warehousing that data, to modeling and reporting that data. With the improvement of cloud data storage and computational capacity, software has new abilities which enable owner/operators to do things like conduct more advanced simulations or be notified of failure through multivariate machine learning models.
Why is Asset Performance Management Valuable?
APM’s objectives include maximizing asset reliability, optimizing associated spend and ensuring safety and compliance with regulatory standards. However, while those are lofty and achievable goals, many owner/operators experience challenges from implementing and sustaining successful mechanical integrity programs. In addition to the benefits above, APM can provide:
Asset Performance Management Limitations
When it comes to driving effective APM at an asset intensive facility, there are several challenges that owner/operators face. Specific limitations include:
What Does the Future of Reliability Look Like?
APM has improved significantly in the past several decades, resulting in greater reliability and safety, combined with improved cost management. However, the industry is continuing to see major advancements in data acquisition, warehousing, modeling, and analytics. With these capabilities in mind, we have the opportunity to build off existing APM architecture, to improve reliability further while decreasing total maintenance and inspection spend.
We believe this leap is being made possible through Quantitative Reliability Optimization (QRO). QRO is an approach to reliability modeling which connects every relevant reliability data point at a complex facility to one integrated model, allowing for near real time complex decision making that allows users to do things like: