Asset Management

Industrial assets are important factors of production.  With changing business environment, significant competitive advantages can be gained if we can sweat the assets more and increase their availability and utilization.   A comprehensive asset management solution can help in

• Capturing all asset information at one place
• Connect the control systems and gather performance data
• Provide a history of the equipment & knowledge base to quickly resolve failures
• Improve people productivity and increase OEE
• Provide visibility into the shop floor and provide better intelligence
• Enable a safer working environment
• Deliver better return on the assets

Asset register is a detailed list of industrial assets.  Large organizations have multiple similar assets that are spread over different lines, units and plants.  Assets also can have other child assets – assemblies, sub-assemblies and so on.  Hence asset identification and hierarchy are   important components of Asset Register to accurately identify an individual asset.  Asset Registers capture more information including nameplate details, asset attributes, OEM technical specifications, supplier and service provider details, key dates (warranty / AMC / insurance / license validity etc.), permits required for work on them, performance parameters, equipment history etc.   Unified systems may aggregate the information specific to the asset and present a 360-degree view of the asset.  Asset Registers play a critical role in managing the life cycle of an asset.

Industrial assets largely comprises of production equipment (including their sub-assemblies and sub-sub-assemblies or they being tracked as individual equipment), instruments used for testing and measuring various attributes in different stages of manufacturing life cycle, spare parts for the equipment, common tools like cranes, forklifts etc., utilities like boilers, generators etc. and fleet of vehicles.   Different class of assets are in turn classified based on equipment group and sub-group, purpose (standby, rotary etc.), criticality (equipment criticality, spares criticality like VED) as well.

Asset Codification is the process or system of arranging the different assets in a structured and systematic form.  Codification helps in identifying and equipment or other productive / non-productive asset uniquely.  A well codification schema gives a lot more information on the underlying asset including location, class, group, sub-group, parent equipment, running serial number if multiple peer class assets exist etc. It also helps in charging the right asset and cost center for all costs and in integration with ERP / business applications.

In spare parts context, it avoids long descriptions and helps in codifying homogenous assets consistently across different plants.  Codification standards exist and organizations generally use their own unique codification schema.  Certain organizations use or refer to international codification schema for their spares.  Codification is often mnemonic but often supplemented by machine readable barcode and QR code. 

Asset Hierarchy is the way of organizing the assets owned by the organization.  Asset Hierarchy mimics the real world set up of assets, including facilities (physical locations) and hard assets (equipment, instruments, inventory, utilities, fleet) in a tree view with parent- child relationships.  A well-organized asset hierarchy is top down and  starts from the enterprise to have the various manufacturing plants, units underneath the plants, lines under these units etc.   Similarly the equipment can have assemblies, sub-assemblies and sub-sub-assemblies defined with parent child relationships.  Asset hierarchy is visually represented and often goes together with  a asset codification schema.

Taxonomy is the classification and organization schema.   Asset taxonomy is used to categorize assets in the organization in various relevant categories and levels.  Asset taxonomy helps in identifying the asset quickly.

An asset lifecycle is the series of events involved from acquisition of assets through its useful life and eventual disposal.  Asset lifecycle may include planning and procurement events too for critical or high value assets.  Asset Management tracks all the activities, performance, behavior and transactions that are applied to the asset through its life cycle to provide a comprehensive view of the asset.

Asset tags or asset codes are identification tags attached to assets. Asset tags help in tracking the movable assets.   For fixed assets, it help in organizing all relevant information of the asset together.  For rotating assets, asset tags can be used to map the position and time period of association with a parent asset.  Physical asset tags used may vary based on the need viz. barcode or QR code labels, metal tags, electronic tags or tamper-proof tags attached to the asset.

Rotating assets or Rotary assets as they are referred sometimes, are  similar assets, belonging to the same equipment grouping / sub-grouping and having similar technical specifications, and are interchangeable.  Examples of rotary assets include motors, pumps etc.  Rotary asset that has been swapped normally goes through maintenance and then goes to store, and lie there till next interchange. Rotary assets may have their own unique identification, sub-assemblies, preventive maintenance schedules and checklists etc.  When rotary assets are interchanged, the location and position in the parent asset can be tracked and rotary asset preventive maintenance may also be scheduled based on the run hours of parent equipment.

Standby assets are  mirror assets in critical process lines that are kept as redundant assets, to avoid line disruption in case of failure of an equipment.  Each of the standby assets will normally be able to take on the entire load on its own and can function in full mode, till the failed equipment is back in action.  Once the failed equipment is back in action, each of standby assets are operated in a round robin basis to ensure that they are always available and ready to use.   Standby assets often mirror each other in specifications, preventive schedules, task lists etc.

Peer class assets are similar assets in equipment group, sub-group and technical specifications.  Functionally they are distributed over the operating environment, at times in different plants.  Being of the same specifications, tracking them as peer class help in populating similar preventive schedules and checklists and propagating updates to each other.   Corrective actions and preventive actions taken on one equipment, based on why why analysis can be horizontally deployed to all peer class assets as well.   Performance parameters, availability, utilization and other asset metrics of each equipment can be benchmarked against each other and comparison of their performance can provide better insights on the equipment.  Peer class assets classification can also be useful in predictive maintenance.

Fault tree analysis is a systematic analysis of all the faults  of the system, expressed in a hierarchical fashion, more often visually as a tree, with each node expanding into the next level of faults.  Fault tree analysis is very helpful in understanding the equipment behavior, failure modes and their probability / past incidences, their contribution in failure or in cascading effects, monitoring and optimizing the interrelationships between different factors for a complex system etc.  Thus it can be used both as a diagnostic system and useful tool for corrective action as well.

Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) is a metric used in equipment maintenance as a measure of problem resolution efficiency.  Time to Repair (TTR) is the time required to troubleshoot and repair failures.  MTTR is expressed as a mean of  TTRs for  a given period of time.  MTTR trending down indicates that the organization is learning and able to quickly and efficiently respond to failures.  A robust CMMS can help in providing the past equipment history and knowledge base, contributing factors for the failure and status of critical parameters, thereby improving the  MTTR.  MTTR is often used with other Maintenance  metrics like Mean Time to Failure (MTBF) and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

Mean time between Failures (MTBF) is a basic measure of the equipment maintainability and reliability.  It represents how often the equipment fails and is computed as the average elapsed time between two successive failures of an equipment during normal operations.  Age of equipment, quality of spares, preventive maintenance effectiveness etc. influence failures and thus MTBF.  A robust CMMS can help in identifying frequent failures, analyzing the root cause, determining the Corrective actions and Preventive actions (CAPA), thereby reducing the chance of failures.  CMMS can also help in rolling out CAPA activities to peer class equipment via horizontal deployment.   MTBF is often used with other Maintenance  metrics like Mean Time to  Repair (MTTR) and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

Maintenance budget is a plan on the money to be spent on repairs and other maintenance items over a particular period of time (generally accounting year).   maintenance budget comprises of spares, labour and external vendor charges.  Certain consumables may also be tracked under maintenance budget.  Maintenance budget can be top down (one budget for all equipment) or bottom up (aggregate of all the indivudal equipment budgets) or a combination thereof (bottom up for critical equipment and general account for others).  Maintenance budgets are substantial and different organizations track differently – by equipment or equipment group or production line, by  time period (monthly, annual), by type of maintenance (preventive, breakdown, shutdown etc.), by vendor services (AMC, O&M contact value etc.).  A robust asset management system can track the maintenance budget efficiently and can provide insights for better management and cost savings.