Asset-intensive industries are grappling with heightened complexities when maintaining the reliability and peak performance of their assets, due to multiple pressures arising from decarbonization initiatives and regulations, aging assets and skilled workforce shortages. In response to these multifaceted challenges, asset performance management (APM) solutions have emerged as indispensable tools. Leveraging advanced capabilities in condition monitoring, predictive analytics, and asset reliability management, APM software empowers organizations to proactively address issues, optimize maintenance strategies, extend the operational life of critical assets, and minimize environmental impact. In the 2023 Verdantix global corporate operational excellence survey, 65% of the 304 executives in operations, maintenance, engineering and process safety roles mentioned plans to increase spend on initiatives that improve asset uptime, reliability and integrity over the next 12 months.

A key component underpinning the success of any APM deployment is robust and reliable data. However, in many organizations today, data related to asset performance – such as maintenance records, sensor data and historical data – are siloed across various systems, departments and formats. Managing and analysing this information can be a complex, time-consuming task, leading to inefficiencies in decision-making and hampering efforts to optimize performance.

Organizations have therefore identified a need to establish a unified, single source of truth – a central repository – for all available asset data. This entails a strong focus on data consistency, quality and efficiency. In the Verdantix 2023 survey, 92% of the 304 executives stated that integrating data from multiple sources was a significant data management challenge for their firms, while 71% mentioned the establishment of a single source of truth as a challenge.

In response to these needs, and the growing market, industrial software and DataOps providers have developed data management solutions that aggregate data from disparate sources, effortlessly contextualise and maintain data, and deliver insights through data analysis and visualization. The benefits of such solutions include:

 

• Robust data acquisition and storage capabilities.
  Industrial data management solutions can obtain near-real-time and historical data through seamless connections to any IT or OT system, such as a process historian or SCADA system. Additionally, they offer tools for extracting useful features from unstructured data, such as images, documents and audio. Once obtained, rather than relying on time-consuming data storage workflows, data management solutions provide tools to configure or automate the processes of archiving, deleting and storing data, for real-time decision-making. AspenTech’s Inmation data management solution acts as a centralized system, with market-leading capabilities not only for vendor-agnostic data acquisition, but also for integrating, managing and analysing data from multiple sources in real time. The solution has supported firms such as chemical manufacturer BASF in reconciling information from legacy systems, to enable plant- and enterprise-wide operational improvements.

 

• Data cleaning and contextualization capabilities.
  Industrial data management solutions enable data quality checks, allowing firms to detect errors due to sensor drifts or duplicated data. In addition, they permit users to contextualize data by labelling and placing data in context with other relevant information – such as annotating P&IDs with notes and references to documents and images. Once contextualized and centralized, asset data can easily be found by navigating documentation such as P&IDs, while the implementation time for new enterprise tools is greatly reduced. This makes it easy for decision-makers to locate, utilize and merge any data with new data sets, for insightful outputs.

 

• Data analytics and visualization functionality.
  Industrial data management solutions can offer out-of-the-box, quick-to-implement analytics and dashboards for a wide variety of use cases, such as machine failure, supply chain disruption and production optimization. With a single source of truth of data, all stakeholders can access, visualize and leverage the same information, to drive insights that are specific to their individual tasks.

 

 

As operations teams in heavy asset firms continue to look for new ways to deploy analytics to improve asset performance and reliability, the need for data management solutions will increasingly be considered a foundational layer. In conjunction with this, Verdantix has witnessed APM software vendors enhancing their APM offerings and developing their competitive edge with data management solutions, through either organic or inorganic developments. For example, AspenTech – which achieved the highest score amongst all the vendors in the Verdantix Green Quadrant benchmark for asset failure prediction – has integrated Inmation with its APM solution, Aspen Mtell, allowing for seamless data transfer and the enhanced optimization of failure predictions, reliability analysis, environmental performance and production.