Building an asset strategy doesn’t have to be a daunting task

Posted: January 29, 2020

I was once involved with a large Oil & Gas business that made use of asset strategy libraries to boost time savings and quality. They not only sped up the implementation of asset strategies, but also guaranteed standardization of maintenance plans across their plants.

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We all know that a well-defined asset strategy is the foundation of a safe, reliable plant. But if you’re in the process of defining these asset strategies, day-to-day challenges like equipment failures can shift priorities. Furthermore, the process of working through your Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis requires an investment in time if you want to get it right. Why not use best practices in the industry to give you a head start?

*To learn more, click here to watch the On-Demand webinar, "Hundreds of truths, but which one to choose? Finding the right balance and optimize asset strategies in record time."

Consistency is key 

While facilitating RCM studies in the past, the most difficult challenge was to stay consistent. Studies are performed over time, with a different group or even different facilitators. Different people meant a variety of terminology and recommendations, making it a challenge to find consensus throughout the company.

RCM is a proven methodology for Risk Based Maintenance (RBM). It creates deep insight into failure behavior and mitigating actions that can reduce downtime significantly. It’s a methodology proven to deliver improved business outcomes, but is often seen as a somewhat daunting task.

To define effective risk-based maintenance plans, you need an abundance of asset-specific data like failure conditions, preventive tasks, and data for mitigating prescriptive actions. I often see a lack of this data resulting in lengthy strategy deployment which has a negative impact on the quality of an asset strategy and slows down the time to return on investment of developing an asset strategy.

In the case of the Oil & Gas business, before asset strategy libraries were introduced, the application of vibration analysis and the frequency of the vibration rounds were dependent on what engineers individually defined in previous years. During our first meeting an internal discussion quickly arose between team members and subject matter experts that led to a standardized frequency for vibration rounds per asset type/failure mode, moving away from having to discuss the frequency of vibration rounds for every asset we analyzed. This saved 60% in man hours during the analysis and created a more uniform approach to maintenance.

AVEVA accelerates asset strategy deployment up to 90% 

Getting complete, accurate data is often challenging. My passion within AVEVA is to help our customers deliver a quality asset strategy sooner, with less effort, which is why my team created the AVEVA Asset Strategy Library. This is a collection spanning more than 20 years and 22,000 man-years of experience. It contains templates of all the most commonly used asset types and consists of more than 1,000 components. For each asset type, it specifies functions, failure modes (with Mean Time to Failure (MTTF)), and prescriptive actions. This library of knowledge has been built up over decades of workshops with our partners. Most organizations customize the standard AVEVA library to their local needs and requirements.

At AVEVA, we believe that prescriptive maintenance is the way forward. What good is predicting a failure if it is not translated into a clear, prescriptive task? One of the premises of a good asset strategy is that it covers all failures that can lead to a critical failure. I’ve personally experienced the quality and confidence that result from having quality content and best practices in place to accelerate strategy deployment resulting in faster return on investment.

Watch this short video, "Accelerate and Optimize your Return on Asset Investment," to learn how a risk-based Asset Strategy will help you make data driven decisions to prioritize your investments where they matter most.