Plant Asset Management: Maximizing Efficiency & Savings in Industrial Operations

Plant asset management is a practice that is used by operations around the world, but many aren’t aware of the intricate ins-and-outs of the discipline and why it should be treated as an essential money-saving strategy in plants of all sizes.

A Definition of Plant Asset Management

Many corporations have asset management plans that include a register, asset identification, and strategic plan for all assets, but the more focused plant asset management discipline is put into place when plants with particularly high expenditures shift their procedures to further maximize their benefits of the material and human assets that work within the space. This is typically done through an aggressive plant asset maintenance plan that can be easily followed and carried out on a routine basis.

How Does Plant Asset Management Work?

When implemented correctly, plant asset management works to alleviate the plant of sky-high costs it can incur when its assets are not maintained or used properly. Plans are typically organized through an interval maintenance schedule that takes into account these key actions:

• monitoring
• service
• refurbishing
• replacement

Naturally, most all competent businesses already have service plans in place to maximize output, but the ones that don’t differentiate their plant’s asset management plans could be prioritizing the maintenance or replacements of assets that won’t affect profit as much as the priciest equipment used within the plant.
As you can see from the above list, plant asset management plans don’t always require specialized steps; they should be as simple to follow as your normal asset management registers. This is best executed when the register is organized by plant hierarchy, starting from the field and going all the way up to the enterprise resource planning team. Here’s how this would work:

1. Maintenance Station: All incorporated assets are visible on a dashboard at a dedicated maintenance station in which all assets are assessed via assigned hierarchal codes alongside corresponding priority levels and other pertinent information, including detailed diagnostics. There, all information regarding the asset’s workflow can be easily accessed and manipulated.
2. Enterprise Resource Planning Team: All of the data collected at the maintenance station will be transferred, either manually or with the help of a cloud-based management system, to the management and enterprise resource planning team. The data is then compared against a host of strategic processes to determine holistic KPIs, OEE, TCOs, TDCs, and TEEPS, amongst other things.
3. Enterprise Asset Management Team: Once the enterprise resource planning team have made their assessments, they will send their info to the denoted enterprise asset management team whose job it is to reform the current plant asset management plan so that it focuses on nurturing higher output. Usually, this is done by developing at least two separate, highly-actionable maintenance strategies.

Benefits of Integrating a Plant Asset Management Plan

The benefits that come with integrating a holistic plant asset management plan are similar to the ones felt when any data-driven maintenance strategies are put into place. Here are some of the reasons why the plan encourages healthy output for a wide range of operations:

• Plant asset management plans promote accuracy: This is most true for operations who have embraced automation, in particular. As mentioned above, the plan can be integrated into existing cloud-based management systems which means the numbers will be highly accurate and accessible to key team members anytime, anywhere. This detail is important as incorporating the asset information on a separate level means that it can be easily analyzed and prioritized for more meaningful real-time interactions across teams.
• Plant asset management plans help predict plant performance: It’s impossible to give a hard prediction in terms of throughput if your priciest, most difficult-to-maintain assets are not be monitored as aggressively as they should be. When plant asset management plans are put into place, however, your planners will be forced to look at a big-picture view which allows for more focused planning strategies that should trickle down into all areas of the operation.
• Plant asset management plans help heighten production levels: When a seamless plant asset management plan is put into the place, key members working in up to five separate departments are able to access information regarding the health of the plants priciest assets any time of the day. This high-tech reality supports a culture of constant cross-departmental collaboration and communication, while at the same time reducing the need for superfluous meetings, emails, and phone calls. What makes this detail especially powerful is that all strategic planning can be performed with heightened production levels in mind, not data questions, or time-consuming check-ins.