Unified Plant Information Collaboration

Asset Lifecycle Management across the enterprise has become vital in the new and rapidly changing environment. If enterprises don’t know where the assets are, how to keep them functioning, and how to replace them when they break or continuous improve the utilization, enterprises can’t keep required production efficiency. Managing assets across time and space is Key for success. Defining the Asset Lifecycle Management Process from a new and innovative angle will optimize the usage of technology to make it easier, fully automated and with a touch to adapt unique requirements.

Unified Plant Information Process

Unified Plant Information Process extends the ability of organizations to leverage knowledge, coordinate actions, avoid duplication, and drive a common focus for all improvement efforts and investments. And these benefits are naturally magnified as they spread across an ever-widening base of asset management stakeholders.

Organizations are under extreme pressure to increase quality, increased environmental and sustainability requirements and at the same time reduced maintenance budgets. Staffs are shrinking and the knowledge required to maintain assets is rapidly being lost through attrition, product proliferation and reduced budgets. Many organizations are already at the point that they are unable to solve the real problems. They are too busy “acting as a fire patrol department” when they should be “utilizing the asset and improving for future business dynamics”.

A Unified Plant Information Collaboration process is still a vision for asset management. Such vision includes all of the stages typically encountered in the management of complex, capital assets; Plan, Source, Commission, Maintain, Improve, Retire, and Operate.

Operators include all departments involved with the operation of the asset and with the products or services created through asset use. For example, in a manufacturing environment this includes manufacturing, sales, product design and supply chain. Asset use and asset care are separate responsibilities with a symbiotic relationship. Asset management generally focuses on asset care issues with the goal of supporting optimal asset use.

Activities in the Unified Plant Information Collaboration Cycle

Activities in the Unified Plant Information Collaboration Cycle involve a collaborative effort between the operators and a variety of independent asset stakeholders, internal and external to the organization, who take primary responsibility for each activity. In a typical asset-intensive environment, external firms (EPCs) are contracted to Engineer, Procure and Construct the facility. Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are sub-contracted to manufacture the process equipment and to participate in the plant commissioning. Maintenance organizations (Maint) take responsibility for preserving the availability and performance of the asset while engineering groups (Engr) take responsibility for auditing performance and recommending improvements or retirement when appropriate. Improvements are often extensive requiring initiation of a new asset management cycle.