Assets are the heart of any manufacturing company. Production equipment, instrumentation, IT systems, even delivery trucks — without these things, a company has no way to sustain its business. The problem, however, is that assets need attention. If they are not maintained properly, the result is costly downtime.
"Our business is predicated on how good our equipment is, how good our assets are," says Glenn Kormanik, vice president and general manager of Service Heat Treating, a Milwaukee-based company that works with OEMs applying a heat process to their products in order to change the metallurgical structure. "If equipment is not running effectively or optimally, then we are not able to make our revenue targets."
Service Heat Treating, however, is not in the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) business. As a result, the company, like many manufacturers in the down economy, had to come up with a viable asset management strategy.
While competitive pressures demand new capital investment, today's economic conditions tend to preclude new purchases. Yet, businesses need to run at peak performance levels — from the server room to the production line — in order to ensure that customer demands are met. Meanwhile, baby boomers are retiring, leaving a gap in the number of skilled professionals who understand MRO operations. Collectively, these conditions are placing new emphasis on enterprise asset management (EAM) applications, which monitor the health of corporate equipment.
"Asset management is now the low-hanging fruit," says Sid Snitkin, vice president and general manager for ARC Advisory Group's enterprise advisory services. "In the current economic situation, nobody wants to buy new equipment, so they are trying to extend the life of their [existing] equipment."
This "doing more with less" mentality is sending manufacturers down two very different paths. Some manufacturers, like Service Heat Treating, are outsourcing EAM to a third party in order to remove the internal responsibility that bogs down production engineers with maintenance tasks, especially given a skills shortage. Others, such as Rolls-Royce Defence Aerospace, are turning the EAM model on its head and using these applications — augmented by the Internet and intelligent devices — to turn asset management into a new source of revenue through aftermarket services to their customers.
What this amounts to is that "EAM is not EAM anymore," according to Snitkin.
Years ago, EAM was considered nothing more than a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), a database holding information about a company's maintenance operations to help with job scheduling, asset management, and inventory control. But CMMS is limited to maintenance management.
Today's organizations need a nimbler, broader approach. To that end, EAM no longer refers to only the physical assets of the organization, be they desktops, mobile devices, or industrial equipment. Now, the definition of corporate assets includes people and an intangible: information.
As a result, EAM is becoming more integrated with other enterprise systems, such as distributed control systems (DCS), product lifecycle management (PLM) software, and even energy management applications. As assets are equipped with sensors that add intelligence, more information flows between the equipment and control systems and even back into the product design process. It is the next wave of collaboration, but it certainly complicates maintenance.