We’ve asked our team of experts to share with us key trends we should keep an eye on in the rapidly converging enterprise asset management and data analytics space. With digital transformation and sustainability continuing to be at the top of organizations’ priority lists, here is a list of five hot topics and notes on how to best navigate them.
1. Asset and Network Resilience
To be resilient in 2023, it means being able to withstand unexpected events and to adapt and recover quickly. Both your physical and people assets will need to ensure that your operation runs smoothly and provides a reliable service to your customers when they need it most. Climate change and extreme weather conditions are ever-increasing factors that impact the operation and maintenance of your assets and the resulting damage and disruption is likely to incur significant unplanned costs. According to the World Bank, disruptions caused by natural hazards, poor maintenance, and mismanagement, cost households and organizations almost $400 billion a year. By implementing processes that establish and improve network resilience, i.e. regular maintenance, inspections, and remote condition monitoring, you will not only increase performance & reliability, but also improve safety levels for all stakeholders, maintain quality compliance, and support sustainability targets.
2. Growing Digital Skills
Digital transformation is ongoing, and it will continue to be a hot topic for years to come. With more C-level executives investing in smart technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning to make better business decisions and cut down on overhead costs, the need for professionals to upskill and stay abreast with the latest technologies has become a must. Don’t believe us? Just look up ChatGPT.
In late 2021 EY conducted a survey where over a third of respondents stated that their organization was planning to upgrade their enterprise asset management software within the next year. Better software means better user experience, and better user experience ultimately means teams working smarter and more collaboratively to exploit the value of the ever-increasing volume of data their increasingly smart assets are generating. Additionally, as the next generation enters the workforce, they’ll naturally expect the enterprise tools that they use to be intuitive and responsive, just like their smartphones.
3. Automation of low value activities
As an organization, having many assets to manage in your portfolio often means that your teams must perform mundane tasks such as data collection and updates, manually generating reports, and ad-hoc maintenance checks that can incur unexpected cost and disruption if not carried out correctly. All of these require more time than is readily available and very few of these activities improve asset reliability and performance.
By implementing an effective asset management solution you can expand your single source of truth around all your assets and inspection, maintenance and renewal activities linked to them. By automating the generation of key reports and speeding up the capture, quantity and quality of data consumed by your EAM solution, you will be making users' lives easier, increase their productivity and give them time back to undertake pro-active rather than re-active asset management.
4. Optimization of decision making
Staying on the topic of efficiency and digital transformation, machine learning is a technology that organizations are increasingly using as a tool to help them make the right decisions, and many times to validate information. Whether it’s maintenance, operations, finance, or sales and marketing projects, optimization can spare you the hassle of trying to sort through data sets to retrieve the info you need and in many cases there is simply too much data (often of varying quality) for a team of humans to get anywhere near the optimal solution. Depending on your business, safety, reliability, resource and funding objectives, or/and constraints, you can model these in your machine learning platform and generate truly optimized plans that you can execute.
With proper optimization it is realistic to achieve up to 20% increase in asset availability and between 15-20% drop in maintenance costs.
5. Pressure to reduce Capital Budgets and Operating Costs
The cost-of-living crisis isn’t only affecting everyday life, but also the corporate world. We foresee this as being one of the most pressing issues for years to come, with finance managers and executives re-evaluating current capital projects and existing contracts and investing in technology that require less manpower and/or increases the productivity of the existing workforce.
A portion of budgets will be allocated to preventative maintenance solutions that minimize the chance of asset failure and improve an asset’s performance. On average, businesses spend 80% of their time reacting to issues that happen unexpectedly, and between 40-50% of an operational budget is spent on maintenance.
With economic growth stalling worldwide, we expect companies to invest cautiously and use prioritization methods to make decisions on which projects they will continue with and how operating and maintenance costs can be controlled whilst not impacting safety and reliability.
Government and federal funding will also play a role here, with grants being made available at a higher rate than in previous years and the submissions for these grants expected to be at an all-time-high. One thing to note is that this will come with a higher level of oversight and an absolute requirement to demonstrate return on investment for the tax payer.
As Arcadis, we’re here to support organizations of all sizes become more sustainable and efficient through solutions such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Enterprise Decision Analytics (EDA), built to help you gain more control of your assets and use that gained information to make the optimal business decision. Get in touch with one of our experts today to see how we could help.
