10.05.11Gopal Krishna, Lead Consultant, Infosys

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Introduction

In Asset Intensive industries such as utilities /process and discrete manufacturing, challenges such as managing high value assets where each failure is costly and disruption in service often requires effective Asset Management program. At the same time, they must also adhere to occupational and environmental safety regulations. The complexity increases when the assets are distributed or linear as the crew needs to travel to work place which is distant apart.

This paper presents the framework for Distributed assets which is a subset of fixed assets. The paper explores the challenges of managing Distributed assets, focusing on utility industry in particular. The paper also highlights the functionality which are required to address these challenges and finally outlines a scoring based guideline to assess & evaluate several ERP packages available in the market today, so as to assist the customer to meet the challenges of Distributed Assets, and hence take an informed decision in the end.

The below figure classifies the different types of fixed assets, which are linear and non-linear assets. Non-linear assets can be further classified as pointed assets which are available at one place/plant location and the focus of this white paper -- Distributed assets, which are spread geographically and require special attributes to locate. The lens of our investigation neatly focuses on this asset, for the rest of the paper.

A typical utility industry overview of distributed assets is shown below.

Challenges with Distributed Assets

The typical challenges the distributed assets pose from the data, operational and maintenance, perspective are outlined below:

Asset Register

• Absence of Maintenance strategy on Asset retirement.

• Absence of complete Asset information, like technical specification, attributes, Asset Hierarchy.

• Limitations in Document Management functionality to manage asset manuals, standard procedures, drawings etc.

• Absence of efficient data points / history to recommend retirement of assets.

• No standardization of enterprise data resulting in duplicity of records.

• Difficulty in enforcing defined quality data to deliver their full set of benefits.

• Asset data not at one place and spread across multiple IT systems requiring additional efforts in life cycle costing, Capital return, Depreciation etc.

Spatial Information

• Difficulty in Tracing Assets -- Assets are geographically spread across, causing delay in locating an asset -- no clear data available on coordinates of asset -- resulting in a significant loss of time.

Scheduling

• Constrained scheduling of resources and work with no alignment to the inspection routes.

• Limitations in Resource Capacity planning resulting in overload or under- utilization of the crew.

• Overshooting budgets & time lines for maintenance activities & for handling exception events.

Spare Parts Control

• Frequent stock out situations.

• No visibility on availability of spare parts to handle emergency situations where the extent of damage and spare parts requirement is ascertained at run time only after conducting the analysis of emergency breakdown.

• Long lead time in transporting the spare parts from the storerooms/warehouses resulting in significant maintenance downtime. Loss of Visibility and control of in-transit spares.

• No visibility of real time stock at one source.

Technology

• Non availability of tools like mobile devices & GIS resulting in delay or No update on work at site- The feedback and status on the work is not known until the crew members inform manually. The Problem is compounded if such tools are not integrated with main ERP system.

• In-efficient /outdated systems resulting in fragmented or no information.

• Bad Data quality and high error rates in asset analysis without any validated systems

• No Real-time communication between planners and crews

• Customer dissatisfaction and loss of credibility: No technology enablement to mark affected assets and timely communication to the affected customers. In a typical scenario of both planned and unplanned service disruption the affected customers should be identified and informed about the disruption of service with the expected time of resumption of the same.

Safety

• Unsafe working conditions risking crew's lives who work without proper supervision. Ensuring proper safety procedures is often challenging without supporting tools and technology.

• Limitations in documenting safety procedures and issue Lock outs and Tag outs

• Unsafe conditions often attracting legal action

Regulation

• No Fulfillment of Legislative directives -- Lack of system support, High costs to serve manually.

• No systems in place to meet regulatory requirements (Asset Management guidelines for optimized utilization of assets -- for e.g. PAS55) and demonstrate compliance. The manual process is tedious and inconsistent.

Addressing Distributed Assets Challenges

EAM framework on distributed assets should focus on mitigation of all above challenges: the Maintenance system cannot be treated as an island if it is to keep the business in shape. The Maintenance system should be integrated seamlessly with other business processes like inventory, procurement and finance. The emphasis of EAM -- Distributed assets should have its roots in Enterprise solutions, resulting in a single-point access rather than residing on individual desktops and point solutions on asset management.

While there are many ERP/EAM packages available in the market which offer functionality and features on Asset Management and work management, following table gives the list of functionality one should look for in those products/packages to address the challenges posed by distributed assets.

These are some of the key features required in an ERP/EAM product to overcome the challenges mentioned above.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The above table identifies the key features or functionality required in an ERP/EAM product/package to manage the distributed assets effectively and to effectively mitigate the associated challenges.

When selecting an ERP/EAM product, with reference to distributed assets such features available with the product would ensure smooth work management for distributed assets. The attached Scorecard for package evaluation can be used to appropriately select the ERP/EAM product for the features described in the table to overcome the challenges.

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Reader's Comments

Date	Comment
Anumakonda Jagadeesh 10.11.11	Excellent analysis on Distributed Assets. Dr.A.Jagadeesh Nellore(AP),India Wind Energy Expert E-mail: anumakonda.jagadeesh@gmail.com
bill payne 10.11.11	Failure to include wirelless software download/upload capability to correct aoftware problems to any SCADA system may be fatal? Garmin has capabitliy for software fixes, http://www.prosefights.org/craig/nuvi1450lm/nuvi1450lm.htm#hellogarmin So let's see if garminn can fix 1051lm Excell trip stats problems.
Gagan Paliwal 11.28.11	This article is a wonderful assessment of challenges faced by organizations in managing their live inventory and other assets. Focus on utilities Industry and evaluation of the EAM packages for end user's benefit is an icing on the cake.

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