Providing asset management during COVID19 has been challenging and has made us re-evaluate the most efficient ways to provide this service.
The COVID-19 crisis has had a significant impact on asset income in recent months. I am sure that asset owners and managers are wondering how to compensate for the loss of income due to this difficult period. If there is anything good to take away from this crisis, it is the chance to innovate. The crisis gives innovators an opportunity to think more clearly and implement rapid and impactful change. The crisis has also given us a better perspective on an inevitable challenge and inspires us to act. Let’s see this crisis as a chance to improve the current way of asset management.
I believe the future of asset management is going through digitization and automation. We also need to start looking more at reliability-focused maintenance rather than the traditional manufacturer-advised maintenance schedule. This will help us to increase the production of assets and therefore revenues.
Let’s look at some of the benefits of digitization and automation for asset management. The first and surely the most important is that they save time, which we are constantly looking for. The second benefit is obviously error prevention which saves both time and money, although this second benefit is only one if the data you used is valid. The third advantage is cost reduction, ensuring a greater profit margin and reaching the full potential of your asset.
Benefits of digitizing asset management
Although digitization and automation for asset management is the future, are we currently at a stage where we can harness them with precision? In two words, my answer would be “not at the moment”. We need to start with getting accurate asset data, because securing renewable energy farm data is not a priority right now.
Moreover, we need to start by validating and optimizing our data so that we can provide artificial intelligence (AI) with accurate and efficient data so that AI can make modeling predictions based on enriched data. AI can then be used to help automate certain tasks and provide the mentioned benefits. Reliable asset data should be viewed as revenue, it should be secured and validated accordingly.
What about reliability-focused maintenance?
Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) is rapidly gaining popularity when combined with a manufacturer’s maintenance program. It focuses on using data from an individual asset to better meet the maintenance and management needs of that asset. I believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a huge role in contributing to this in the future. We could accurately analyze an asset’s performance and several other factors such as abnormal temperatures, status logs, and asset output.
If we could accurately analyze an asset’s data, then we could successfully implement Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) leading to less asset downtime and a huge increase in revenue.
RCM can be used to create a more cost-effective maintenance strategy to tackle the main causes of equipment failure, it is a more innovative approach to defining a routine maintenance program that would make better use of the scarce economic resources we have. . Proper use of Reliability Centered Maintenance would result in less required maintenance and less asset downtime, thereby increasing an asset’s production and maintenance costs.
Learn more about our asset management tools here .
By Jake Mason, Windfarm and Turbine Inspection Manager