EAM – Anyone for Mining “Hidden” Dollars?

Surely you’re thinking, “How can dollars be ‘hidden’ in enterprise asset management (EAM) systems, waiting to be mined or uncovered?”

Indeed, there are vast treasure troves of value waiting to be mined and liberated in EAM systems! In order to access these untapped veins of ore in your company’s EAM implementation you’ll need to know the best practices to apply.

EAM systems are used by companies in capital-intensive sectors, such as oil and gas, utilities, and transportation, for a variety of purposes, such as:

• Tracking capital equipment and assets in far-flung areas in their global operations
• Managing preventive maintenance schedules and requirements of expensive assets
• Monitoring and logging emissions from equipment for regulatory reporting and compliance
• Managing spare parts inventories that themselves can be capital items on a balance sheet

Each item of capital equipment has many data attributes that need to be accurately collected, updated, and maintained within a company’s EAM system.

Data can be as basic as a manufacturer’s name, equipment model, and serial number, or as detailed as the bill of materials for that item, maintenance schedules and diagrams, spare parts inventory requirements, and everything else that is worth tracking over the equipment’s lifecycle.

Starting from data collection, there are many ways in which equipment data can be of poor quality, whether by omission of key elements, or by inconsistent and incomplete data entry into legacy databases. Sometimes the omissions are due to the very simple fact that when complex equipment is procured, its constituent parts are not all called out comprehensively.

At other times, such as when one company acquires another, diverse sources of equipment data, in very different formats, need to be merged into one database.

Not having accurate or complete equipment data can lead to a lot of headaches, such as unexpected equipment downtime due to missed maintenance, or spare parts not being at hand to recover from a malfunction. A single event of this type can costs tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue alone.

Preventing problems resulting from poor data quality in EAM systems thus becomes a critical step in mining the hidden dollars that are otherwise squandered away in completely avoidable operational crises.

Recently a project that I was actively involved with was able to mine hidden dollars with EAM utilizing data quality in order to maximize returns. This method allowed the large petrochemical company to avoid a large cost and was able to mine one million hidden dollars for the company. So what are you waiting for? Put your miners’ hat on and let’s get that treasure!

Herb Hadley, Director, Solutions Development - Global EAM Practice Lead, Utopia, Inc.