Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), also generally called Asset Management, is the discipline that seeks to manage the entire life cycle of an organisation’s assets in order to maximise their value.
Businesses around the world need to reduce the cost of their assets, increase productivity, keep up with changing rules, regulations and economic changes in the marketplace. This requires a system that accurately manages asset inventory, manages various types of asset maintenance and performance indicators, maintains a detailed cost history and also manages operations.
By optimising asset management, companies also reduce safety risks, minimise environmental impacts, improve performance and reduce legal risks associated with operational assets.
How to improve and optimize asset management in your company
Improving and optimising Asset Management is a challenge that organisations face in order to reduce costs and increase the productivity of their assets.
To ensure success, the basis on which the asset management strategy is formulated must be taken into account. It must be structured with the following key points:
Asset classification
The basis of a successful asset management strategy depends first on the structure of the asset classification. Properly classifying your assets can be the difference between success and failure. Classifying assets through a dynamic structure based on properties and attributes will make classification and management much simpler.
Centralisation of data
It is essential to centralise all-important asset information in one place. When implementing a document management system in asset management projects, we must bear in mind that there is a large amount of technical documentation that will be required for the exercise of the activity by the various actors involved in the operation of the assets.
An Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution will give you the ability to quickly access important asset information from a central repository, reducing errors and improving management efficiency.
Performance indicators
Asset management through performance indicators is another important aspect of this strategy. The use of software solutions in the field of asset maintenance makes a significant difference, especially when we have to make calculations from different sources of information.
In this environment, it is important to establish a definition of asset management performance indicators, also known as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which will help us make different decisions of vital importance to our work and also to the organisation.
The main asset management KPIs to be monitored are
- Mean Time To Repair (MTTR): Indicator that shows the estimated time a piece of equipment will be out of service while being repaired. In other words, the time it takes to make a repair.
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): This is the arithmetic mean of the time between failures of an asset. Managers usually consider it as the average time of something working until it fails and needs to be repaired again.
- Failure Frequency (FF): The identification of equipment failure frequency helps to control the life of the devices, minimizing the costs associated with the maintenance of the installation.
- Resolution and response time of incidents (Trsl and Trsp): The Trsl provides information on the resolution time of the different breakdowns according to their criticality. With Trsp, managers can measure the response time of suppliers according to the different types of incidents.
Maintenance
For your asset management strategy to be successful, you need to have a maintenance plan. All company assets require maintenance, whether it be preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, technical maintenance or other.
Good asset management requires scheduling preventive maintenance based on time intervals/meter readings, monitoring preventive maintenance, managing planned and unplanned maintenance activities, optimizing stock management to accurately meet maintenance needs, and recording all activities and costs.
Optimization of resources
It is important to plan activities and resources properly, trying to automate all the tasks and processes of each department so that management becomes more fluid and efficient.
For example, the use of telemaintenance, which consists of carrying out some operations in remote locations where the service personnel on-site transmit all the relevant information to the support desk or the customer service centre, speeding up the solution of problems and reducing travel costs.
Dashboards
Managing summary information is fundamental for the best visualization of the data generated by the teams and to be able to successfully manage your company’s assets. These summaries must be interactive and intuitive, in order to make comparisons and extract crucial information for decision making at all levels.
Mobile integrations
When choosing an asset management software, check if the solution can be used on mobile devices. This allows you to have instant access to data anytime, anywhere, increasing your ability to communicate with team members involved in all aspects of asset management.
The need for a EAM in a maintenance strategy
The EAM solution optimises asset use and performance at lower operational costs, eliminating unplanned downtime and maximising the value of all asset types across the enterprise. The solution allows organisations to develop comprehensive programmes for calibration and preventive, corrective and routine maintenance of equipment, improving the day-to-day efficiency of operations.
At Retain we provide complete EAM solution tools for Strategic Enterprise Asset Management, driving the digital transformation of the asset lifecycle, offering a set of applications with global systems aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs of the company.
The Retain tools allow the management of the phases of the standard that applies the Root Cause Analysis in asset maintenance so that the user has the necessary information for decision making in the continuous improvement of asset management.
With Retain, the user has access to a catalogue of failure modes that can be classified according to the criticality of the assets or the regulations that apply to them. You will have a global vision of the state of your assets through the calendars for maintenance plans.
It has a dashboard as an initial screen with all the important information, so you can review the management at a glance, accessing in real time the status of the assets and/or suppliers, the cost, the investment or the evaluation of failure resolution times (both repetitive and non-repetitive). In this way you can ensure greater operational reliability.
If you want more information, contact us and an expert consultant will help you discover how we can help you.
