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Recent Trends

The importance of physical asset management to a company’s success has increased over recent decades. Automation is one reason for this trend, as it has forced industries to delegate more tasks to machines, thereby making maintenance more crucial. The perceived significance of maintenance by management spans a wide variety of perspectives. Some see it as merely repairing broken equipment in a plant; others take a broader view and see it as critical to a firm’s profitability.

It is well known that Oil and Gas companies struggle with asset management challenges that traditional approaches don’t address. Often systems and people simply aren’t communicating. But when it comes to increasing asset life, planning shutdowns and reducing manual interventions, what is required is a real-time collaboration across teams. With the intelligent asset management solution for oil and gas from global majors, companies can improve collaboration, monitor asset condition and proactively manage their assets. These intelligent asset management solutions provide a unified platform that links information from the plant, financial and operational control systems to gain more complete information about assets and a more cohesive, time-based view of the operations. The solution then connects the need–to know people and systems, giving these stakeholders information needed to take informed decisions to optimize the efficiency and productivity of the plant operations. Typically these kinds of solutions provide advanced analytics and intelligence tools to help predict plant performance and equipment health using key performance indicators. Monitoring performance, setting targets and optimizing resources are highly enabled, thereby delivering plant costs benefits. This facilitates intelligent evaluation and enhancement of oil and gas operations to reach desired production levels, identify possible ways to reduce costs, mitigate risk, optimize outage scheduling and comply with environmental regulations more easily.

Future Perspective in Plant Asset Management

Companies are increasingly turning to plant asset management as an optimization strategy to improve their process efficiencies, reduce maintenance costs, thus enhancing their return on investments / assets. Companies are known to have reported almost a 30 percent reduction in maintenance budgets and up to a 20 percent reduction in production downtime owing to a robust plant asset management strategy. It is noteworthy to mention that these savings contribute significantly to a company’s bottom line, since almost 40 percent of manufacturing revenues are budgeted for maintenance. Engineering Services Organizations can pitch in with services such as asset documentation support. Controls and Automation will be harnessed to collate complex real time data, and automate actions for plant performance enhancements.

Written by QuEST Global

on 13 Jun 2014