Asset Performance Management Explained

What is Asset Performance Management (APM)?

In today's fast-paced industrial landscape, the importance of maintaining optimal performance of physical assets cannot be overstated. From manufacturing plants and power stations to transportation networks and healthcare facilities, the reliability and efficiency of assets directly impact operational success and business profitability. This critical need has given rise to the field of Asset Performance Management (APM), a comprehensive approach combining methodologies and advanced software solutions to maximize asset value and performance throughout their lifecycle.

Over the past few decades, APM has undergone significant transformation, driven by technological advancements and evolving industry demands. Traditional maintenance practices, which were predominantly reactive, have progressively given way to more proactive and predictive strategies. The integration of sophisticated data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized how organizations monitor, manage, and optimize their assets.

As technology associated with digital controls, desktop computers, and resulting software started to mature in the late 90s, the term Asset Performance Management started to be associated with software and service solutions designed to help optimize the performance of a customer’s assets.

Meridium Inc. (a software company that was acquired by GE in 2016) pioneered the use of the term APM and the development of enterprise-level APM solutions. APM software focuses on connecting disparate data sources and, using a collection of analytic techniques, including advanced predictive analytics, turns data into actionable insights while fostering collaboration and knowledge-management across the organization.

Asset Performance Management is more than technology. It’s a unified strategy that assists people, processes, and systems to work together toward sustained operational excellence. It’s no simple task to achieve, but we’ve seen customers drive transformational value when they’re able to investment in enterprise level APM solutions that helps them to see the organizational changes required (such as APM COEs) to enable the process changes across functional teams and enable a continuous improvement culture.

According to the latest Verdantix APM Green Quadrant ranking report, demand for APM software has increased significantly since it was first launched in the late 1990s. The last five years in particular have witnessed an acceleration in corporate investment. Verdantix analysis project global spending across all industries on APM software, content and related services will reach more than $54B in 2028. A major driver of this growth is due to APM becoming more important in corporate agendas as asset intensive organizations look for solutions that can help achieve strategic targets, provide a single centralized solution and leverage emerging technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) along other techniques to meet emissions targets. This shift has led a rapid acceleration of new APM technologies to meet the market’s evolving needs.

Benefits of APM

Asset performance management is a proven approach to improving asset reliability and availability, reducing O&M cost, increasing operational efficiency, improving decision making, reducing EH&S risks and increase visibility into emission reduction programs. Contrary to popular belief, Implementing an effective APM strategy is more than installing a series of sensors or point software solutions that monitor and track your systems and assets. APM software provides the most value for companies when providing an integrated, connected enterprise solution that enables asset-intensive organizations to bring disparate data sources together to find new trends and insights that can help enable safer, more reliable operations while facilitating optimal performance at a lower sustainable cost.

APM uses data management, pattern recognition, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to make asset-centric organizations more productive, improving asset availability while reducing operational costs and risks. Picture this; your engineering team is responsible for maintaining 100s of assets across multiple locations. Priorities are shifting, new energy sources are being added and it becomes increasingly more difficult to know where to best spend your time. Now, imagine getting ahead of performance deviations and failures by having a central system that uses logic to synthesize sensor, asset, CMMS and other data sources to provide visibility to better prioritize. Sounds pretty great, right?

Many asset intensive sites in operation today are still using a variety of individual software solutions and paper processes that have been amassed over a number of years in an attempt to address reactive maintenance practices and work more toward condition-based maintenance. The challenge with this situation is lack composability and interoperability between software to easily find contextualized insights. In this scenario, it becomes increasingly difficult to make data-backed decisions at scale.

If this is your primary approach to managing production assets, you are likely not achieving the right balance of asset cost, availability, and risk management for your operations. While the exact figure varies by industry, unplanned downtime often costs a business 10X the cost of planned maintenance because of the disruption to the business and lost production. It’s about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) impacts!

Analytics Drive Deeper Insights for APM

Highly effective APM software solutions are driven by analytics (diagnostic, descriptive, and predictive), rooted in integrated business work processes and provide embedded expertise to help users adopt and scale more quickly. These expert-built analytics contextualize data to create actionable information by looking across multiple sites to find patterns and opportunities for improvements. Now, with the emergence of GenerativeAI, APM has the potential to prescribe maintenance recommendations from structured and unstructured data.

Leveraging an APM with descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive AI/ML capabilities and computer vision helps you answer questions such as:

Asset Monitoring is only the start. To truly drive out higher asset availability, and even to uncover asset reliability issues (aka design), you should be employing Digital Twins. APM software can leverage Digital Twin models to detect very subtle indicators of potential failure.

The Digital Twin is a model of how the equipment should operate, where sensors would be placed and monitored and near real-time performance. A statistically significant deviation in how the equipment is actually operating is a warning sign of potential downtime. These analytical techniques can help companies move from break-fix and time-based maintenance to condition-based strategies which simultaneously eliminate unnecessary maintenance and improve equipment reliability. As part of our APM suite, Digital Twin blueprints are made available in our Accelerators Library, providing configurable templates to help effectively setup a Digital Twin and begin monitoring. GE Vernova’s Accelerators include GE and non-GE equipment types, giving engineers the ability to monitor more assets than ever before.

Cutting-edge data science

Undergoing digital transformation isn’t quick or easy, but with proven technology solutions like APM, your organization can gain a significant competitive edge.

As one of the only companies in the world that designs, builds, connects, operates, maintains, and services critical industrial assets – the entire lifecycle of equipment – we at GE Vernova are uniquely positioned to offer the most comprehensive APM solution in the market: GE has decades of deep-domain equipment expertise and cutting-edge data science and analytics technology. We’ve used the unique know-how and industrial expertise that helped us build our own $50B services business as a foundation of our APM solution. With the recent spinoff of GE Vernova from GE Aerospace and GE HealthCare, we remain hyper focused on asset-intensive industries and work closed with our Gas Power, Renewables, Power Conversion and other business units to continually enhance our APM for new use cases.

Our Asset Performance Management (APM) software helps customers monitor key pieces health indicators that help determine asset health and predictive maintenance requirements. APM software applications help producers get more detailed monitoring of their entire processes. By maximizing overall health and reliability of assets, industrial companies can operate more efficiently and reduce costs over time.

GE Vernova’s APM offers composable and interoperable applications that can be deployed to cover 1, 10, 100s or thousands of assets across a single site or enterprise. Our APM Strategy, Health, Reliability, Performance Intelligence, Integrity and Autonomous Inspections applications are available as a SaaS offering in the cloud and most are available on-premises as well. The solution works across all equipment, all OEMs, and all industries, across the plant, and across the fleet. Our APM solution incorporates a rich catalog of content to get organization’s a “faster time to live” including asset monitoring analytics, predicative analytic Digital Twins, and business process workflows.

For decades, we’ve been aligning our financial incentives with those of our customers through long-term service agreements on the industrial equipment we sell, from aircraft engines to combustion turbines. The tools and techniques we’ve developed are unparalleled and can help companies balance the traditionally competing priorities of reducing costs, improving availability, and managing risk.

Are you ready to make your operation safer and more reliable while helping to ensure optimal performance at a lower sustainable cost? If you’d like to expereince our APM solutions in action, check out our Demo Hub, or contact us.