Optimizing Asset Strategies with Risk Based Maintenance

A leading challenge for industrial producers today is ensuring the most efficient and effective use of their Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budgets. Under rising pressure to reduce costs and improve profitability, planned and preventive maintenance activities become vital to improve equipment reliability and reduce unplanned corrective maintenance, which is typically 35% more costly. Furthermore, unplanned downtime of critical assets can have a significant impact on future planning.

According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact for Oil and Gas report the average operating revenue loss per hour of unplanned downtime per oil refinery site is approximately $500,000. Having a well-run, efficient maintenance program that can identify and rectify equipment problems before failure rather than after reduces downtime and its costs. Amid demands to cut costs and increase productivity, most operators understand they need to improve their current maintenance practices. 

Maintenance and reliability leaders in the industrial sector understand that implementing more effective and efficient asset maintenance strategies is vital to their success, and moving toward a risk-based optimization approach is key. By prioritizing investment allocation based on asset criticality, risk, and operating context, leaders in the industry are seeking to reform their maintenance programs by: 

• Eliminating costly and unnecessary planned maintenance tasks; 
• Preventing under-maintaining critical assets with the highest risk; 

• Extending current maintenance intervals without increasing risk; and, 
• Replacing calendar-based maintenance tasks with condition-based monitoring activities. 

However, in practical application, this is not an easy task.  To enable the process and reduce the amount of manual work required, strategy owners must be able to import their existing maintenance plans into a strategy management tool where they can perform a structured review.  Once this review is complete, they need to make suggested changes, additions, or removal of maintenance tasks to align to their best practices and then programmatically send the optimized maintenance plans back to the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system. These capabilities are fundamental to helping ensure harmonization between the strategy management tool that is used to determine what tasks to perform and why, and the maintenance execution system where the work is ultimately planned, scheduled, and executed.   

GE Digital's Asset Performance Management (APM) strategy management tools provide a single source of organizational visibility, control, and approval of asset maintenance strategies. APM enables the standardization of best practice maintenance strategies across the enterprise. GE Digital’s Asset Strategy Implementation (ASI) feature in APM Strategy provides tight integration with SAP-PM to seamlessly facilitate the maintenance optimization process. Now available in the cloud, users can benefit from architectural improvements that provide enterprise scalability, enhance performance, and provide maximum flexibility through new cloud-friendly configurability options. 

The ASI application utilizes Implementation Packages that allow strategy and master data owners to directly manage the maintenance plans, maintenance items, task lists and operations used to execute work. This seamless integration with SAP-PM means that your team is free from trying to manage this process between two disconnected systems through manual transfer of data through load sheets that introduces inefficiency and governance and sustainment challenges that lead to a breakdown or organizational loss of confidence in the process.  The implementation packages in ASI are also intrinsically connected with the asset strategies in the Asset Strategy Management (ASM) feature in APM strategy  – Learn more about the key features in APM Strategy.  

ASI’s capabilities include: 

• Import existing maintenance plans to automatically create asset strategies and actions; 
• Link strategy actions to individual maintenance items or operations within a maintenance plan; 
• Utilize predefined General and Equipment or Functional Location specific Task Lists; 

• Create and export custom work instruction reports; 
• Manage multiple asset strategies in a common implementation package; 
• Utilize SAP Plan builder to automate creation of single cycle maintenance plans; and,  
• Create and update Maintenance Plans through an interface utilizing direct remote function calls to SAP-PM. 

Let’s take the example of a fleet of haul trucks in a large mining operation. The likelihood is that multiple maintenance tasks have been in place for a significant period of time. Tasks could include replacing the brake cooling oil filter, checking the roto chambers for leakage, and checking operation of the retarder to name a few. Depending on the circumstances, the current strategies may have been originally established based on manufacturer recommendations or tribal knowledge of past equipment subject matter experts.  These existing maintenance strategies on the fleet may be sub-optimal and probably have not been periodically reviewed and adjusted over time.  

Asset Strategy Implementation would enable the asset owners to perform a structured review to determine if the current practices could be made more cost efficient or more effective at mitigating known risks.  The improved maintenance strategy could be based on a risk-based methodology like RCM or FMEA, or a revised best practice established by a central reliability team in the form of a strategy configuration template. Learn more about GE Digital’s out-of-the-box strategy templates for various asset types and industry verticals.  

Once the optimized strategy has been approved, then the adjustments to the existing maintenance plans could be made directly in the Asset Strategy Implementation tool, and the new or adjusted maintenance strategy can be programmatically sent back to SAP.  This approach could be used to optimize and standardize maintenance practices and significantly improve maintenance effectiveness and reliability across the entire fleet of haul trucks in the enterprise. 

With our new ASI in the cloud offering, strategy owners can further benefit from: 

• On-demand implementation: Send data requests as needed at various levels of the implementation package, which improves performance and speed to complete tasks. 

• On-demand data validation: Validate data on-demand before implementation to help reduce mistakes, ensure data quality, and enforce adherence to customer-specific master data standards. 
• Simplified import and export capabilities: Configure custom import and export workflows without rules customization. 
• Policy-based field mappings: Out-of-the-box flexibility of field mappings without rules customization. 
• Enhanced field search parameter configuration: Better control of field lookup parameters without rules customization. 
• Improved performance and user experience: Complete time-sensitive workflows more efficiently. 

• Reduced administrative, maintenance, and upgrade costs. 

We believe that ASI is a foundational capability for industrial organizations that are looking to reduce costs and optimize maintenance related activities for critical equipment. Bringing risk-based strategy development and execution tools together in one integrated application allows for a sustainable cycle of continuous performance improvement.  

Additionally, integration of strategy development capabilities outside of maintenance, such as equipment monitoring (SmartSignal), inspections, operator rounds, asset health, and policies for strategy governance and performance evaluation, and more makes GE Digital’s APM Strategy a necessity for your digital transformation journey.  

Using APM Strategy you could increase preventative maintenance by 25%, obtain a 100% ROI in less than a year, and even witness maintenance cost savings in just days.