Asset Performance Management (APM) 4.0 concerns far more than just asset reliability and availability. It is all about fully optimized asset performance driving to any manufacturing company’s bottom line. It is a significant step beyond improved availability in asset maintenance management (APM 1.0).

At the International Maintenance Conference (IMC) 2021 in December, most of the attendees were talking about condition-based monitoring, a product space where AspenTech is the pioneer in AI-driven analytical approaches. AspenTech is raising the bar to make the software easier to use and more capable, while assisting the EAM system and its users to detect, protect, correct, and prevent operational issues.

There are a lot of buzzwords being bandied around as “initiative,” but are really tools to try to achieve an initiative, not the initiative itself. They include digital transformation, digital twin, data lake, cloud, edge, and so on. Some twenty years ago, such focus on technology caused over half the data warehouse and business intelligence projects to fail—and we could be in danger of repeating that today.

The Buzzwords Are the Answer, but What’s the Question?

My suggestion, which I presented in my session at IMC 2021, is don’t build huge data lakes. Much like the story of baseball player “Shoeless” Joe Jackson as depicted in the film “Field of Dreams”, the thinking behind this is “If you build it, he will come!” Make sure you understand and have a good grip on the precise problem to solve, put the things together to solve it and make it extensible so you can add other problems later.

To do that, understand the main drivers (KPIs) of your business. The first are items that protect the license to operate including safety, environmental and legal compliance. There may be more such as sustainability and corporate social responsibility.

Next are the performance optimization items including equipment availability, energy usage and high value products produced. Understanding these drives the requirements for APM 4.0. The most important KPI is to keep the equipment running because you cannot achieve the other KPIs if the equipment is broken. Start your digitalization journey there.

But, of course, APM 4.0 is more than that. There are several places where you incur margin losses: schedule, equipment availability, asset performance and quality and yield. For any manufacturing operation providing goods, you must plan it right, operate it right, maintain it right and manage the risk and cost of decisions made in those activities. The equipment must be available and fully perform its intended function while respecting costs and risks.

The goal of APM 4.0 is to improve the overall lifecycle return on assets (RoA).

The AspenTech APM 4.0 Portfolio is Equipped to Help You

Aspen Mtell^® uses pioneering machine learning based pattern recognition to measure normal plant operating performance and to detect anomalies and precise failure signatures that link root cause and failure modes. It dispatches early warnings and correction/mitigation advice weeks and months in advance of impending degradation and failures.

Aspen ProMV^® learns the correct operational strategy from AI analysis of archived data and then continuously monitors and advises when and precisely how to adjust to keep yield and quality on track.

Aspen Fidelis™ assesses the cost and risks of any decisions made on operational availability and performance that limit production for capital expenditure and operational expenditure situations.

Aspen Event Analytics™ for operators detects “not okay” conditions and dispatches advice for quick corrections ensuring nothing spirals out of control. It is an easy-to-use tool, with self-service analytical heavy-lifting built-in and automated shape recognition to identify and visually correlate trends that matter.

AspenTech solutions use Autonomous Agents (small pieces of software that do the work, so you don’t have to) to protect and optimize a whole plant.

RoA occurs by optimizing both mechanical and process asset performance to ensure sustainable operations, from assets that run safer, greener, do not break down, cost less to maintain and produce more and higher quality products. The results drive a major impact on a manufacturing company’s bottom line.

To learn more about AspenTech APM solutions, watch Agent Scalability with AspenTech APM 4.0.