Get Insights to Drive the Energy Transition with Next-Gen APM

As the energy transition charges forward, organizations have to do more than avoid unplanned downtime and reduce O&M costs. Advanced Asset Performance Management (APM) can help manage the mounting demands and abundance of data in industry.

With more data than ever at our disposal, it is becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the noise. Now, organizations are tasked with making legacy assets more efficient, on-boarding renewable assets, meeting decarbonization goals and are met with more options than ever before to achieve those goals. With Asset Performance Management (APM), organizations can leverage data to perform advanced workloads, deploy prescriptive analytics, and enhance efficiency with a composable and interoperable SaaS solution.

APM, when used correctly, is a powerful tool that can dramatically increase the reliability and availability of assets, while also helping to reduce the overall operational and asset risk profile of an organization. Today, APM is designed to provide users the ability to assess and assign asset criticality, develop maintenance strategies, perform condition-based maintenance, deploy AI/ML models for near real-time monitoring, support detailed reports and asset integrity, and even utilize Digital Twins to help ensure optimal thermal performance. While currently capable of impressive outcomes, some APM solutions fall flat in enabling innovation to address emerging requirements.

In heavy industry, assets are designed and built to have long lifespans and are optimized to be as cost effective as possible. However, as time passes, these assets could cause potential issues for operators that include technological obsolescence, increased maintenance costs, limited integration and data access ability, and a slew of other potential concerns. Therefore, asset intensive organizations now must optimize these assets to maintain expected performance, increase flexibility and reduce emissions.

Due to the need to optimize asset performance, increased flexibility and reduce emissions organizations are finding it difficult to prioritize against these new targets. Leveraging legacy APM strategies or point solutions no longer allows the innovation required to be futureproof.

To support the continued digitization required to support the energy transition, organizations must continue to consider cost, availability, and emissions reduction for assets. Looking into 2024 and beyond, there are a few critical areas that the next-generation APM must address to enable the success of organizations.

For the next generation of APM it will be critical to:

The advancement of the energy transition demands new approaches to APM. We must go beyond optimizing assets, plants and fleets for cost and longevity, and look at what operations and maintenance choices we can make to reduce carbon emissions while balancing risk.

Next-gen APM empowers companies to manage systems optimized for reducing emissions while hitting other business goals around cost-effectiveness, availability, and risk. By bringing in more robust qualified data, interpreting it using Digital Twins, and presenting it in intuitive frameworks that requires less specialized knowledge, you can make decisions needed to accelerate energy transition.

To do so, APM needs to ensure that new data sources can be easily on-boarded and integrated. This means a focus on data loaders, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other strategies that can allow organizations to easily bring in new assets, sensors and other data sources as seen fit.

Next, APM must be able to provide intuitive AI/ML technology that amplifies human performance. In high-risk environments and asset-intensive industries, workers require real-time data and context to support the organization’s goals. From there, organizations that are operating at scale across data sources need an APM that is composable based on requirements. Composability gives users the setup they need, but also avoids rogue development which could increase development costs. This approach still allows innovation but helps ensure consistency.

Finally, to bring all the pieces together, APM needs to be flexible in how it can be deployed. This means APM must work across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid data sources to support critical workloads. With this flexibility, organizations have a powerful APM that can truly act as the single pane of glass for all asset-related data.

As we look forward beyond “next-gen APM,” the future will require knowing what generating capacity is available across a fleet of assets, and then accounting for emissions from all sources be they traditional, microgrids, energy storage, vehicle to grid (V2G), solar, wind or biomass. It will require tighter integration to supply chain processes and systems to use asset management outcomes to augment decisions around the criticality of assets that drives inventory management and procurement costs.