How to make your APM Solution Consistent and Actionable

Contributors: Don Sands (Synengco), Steve Miller (Odbok), Mark Freund & Greg L Towne (Diriger)

When you combine the expertise, experiences, technologies, and systems of the members of a collaborative ecosystem like Odbok, you get the synergy of an Asset Performance Management (APM) problem solving capability that is innovative, consistent and User actionable. It is just what you would expect in order to establish a modern Industry 4.0 environment that needs to be more than just a reporting and graphics solution.


WHAT ISSUES AND PROBLEMS CURRENTLY EXIST IN THE INDUSTRY?

Let’s look at some of the problems we already know about:

  • Underperforming assets account for approximately 30% share of operating expenses

  • Repair and maintenance costs increase by 10 – 15% yearly.

  • $4 of profit is lost for each $1 spent on repairs.

  • Every third maintenance and repair activity is unnecessary

  • Working staff spend less than 4 hours daily on the direct execution of work

  • 50% of industry employees will retire in the next seven years.

TRENDING BUSINESS GOALS

The problems above have been accentuated by existing and predicted business expectations and goals, such as:

  • Maximising reliability and availability so that impacts on OEE can be readily assessed

  • Providing quick access to trusted asset information across all classes in real-time

  • Building workforce collaboration to maximise skills utilisation

  • Visualisation of AI-based insights that facilitate fast and accurate decision-making

  • Accurate remediation to close the loop, control costs and sweet your assets.

INFLUENCES AND MEGATRENDS

Our approach is influenced by leveraging several megatrends impacting most asset-intensive operations.

  • The transition from human-based decisions to digital machine-assisted decisions

  • The gig economy where personnel do not stay in the same job for long

  • The transition to sustainable and renewable resources means that traditional life cycle asset management has additional complexity and constraints

  • The rapid increase in new technologies and methodologies forces organisations to embrace change or risk obsolescence.

These megatrends drive towards increased use of digital technologies to support faster decisions and sustainability within increasingly complex environments and constraints.

Hence Asset Management needs to accommodate:

  • The increasing use of digital technologies to support physical asset management

  • The ability to use short lifecycle digital technologies (due to speed of innovation) with long lifecycle physical assets (due to maximising lifecycle value from investments)

  • Customisation of management processes to fit the actual operation, and

  • The provision of systems that have high adoption rates via low cognitive loads.

The quality of the data used by the digital tools and the humans is the key to making digital machines better decision makers. A key element of our solution is the design and governance around quality data and structures to support the collaboration between digital devices and humans, as well as providing for “Explainable” Artificial Intelligence.

INTEROPERABLE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM

We believe digital solutions should be sticky due to the value they create rather than being sticky due to being locked into a particular vendor’s digital ecosystem. As a result, subscribing to an open standard, vendor-neutral digital ecosystem allows for low-cost solution switching and portability. The framework adopted, provides for futureproofing of digital technologies as the digital services and components are abstracted away from the digital tools, thus deriving several benefits:

  • Ease of configuration of new digital tools as they can draw upon the “Common Conceptual Object Model (CCOM)” for configuration

  • Simpler management of change as the modifications can be implemented at the CCOM level and the digital tools can be checked against this shared resource, and

  • It can potentially extend the life of current enterprise systems at a lower technical debt.

We subscribe to ISO Standard 18101 and the Open Industrial Interoperable Ecosystem (OIIE) that forms part of the standard to ensure the Interoperable Digital Ecosystem is fully vendor neutral with open ISO standards as the basis of vendor neutrality.

References:

ISO 18101 https://www.iso.org/standard/68521.html

Open O&M http://openoandm.org/standards/

OIIE https://www.mimosa.org/open-industrial-interoperability-ecosystem-oiie/

CCOM https://www.mimosa.org/mimosa-ccom/


BEST OF BREED SOLUTIONS

We are putting forward several best-of-breed solutions that can interoperate with each other and your existing enterprise systems in a vendor-neutral ecosystem. Our experience in delivering such solutions allows us to adapt to the customer’s requirements as they progress through the APM journey/maturity without impediment. We do this by packaging a fully outsourced APM solution to a fully insourced solution with the ability to transition to different levels without restriction.

SOLUTION CAPABILITY OVERVIEW

The model outlined below is indicative of our suggested APM solution in a System-of-Systems environment.

The interoperability capability provided by DirigerHUB makes the solution as seamless and scalable as possible, plus allows for flexible transition approaches aligned to the internal capability within the customer organisation. Additional system-of-systems capabilities and data sources can be added as required.

SENTIENT SYSTEM COMPONENT

More information at www.sentientsystem.com

Sentient System is a decision support and real-time optimisation platform for asset-intensive operations. It uses a self-learning digital twin of a process to provide for model-based decisions. The key to the technology is to automatically maintain alignment between the physical plant and the digital representation of the plant. The system monitors the fundamental changes in performance and asset consumption, continuously calibrates the digital twin by sophisticated machine learning and uses this self-calibrated digital simulation to provide:

  • Detailed asset health and performance at a component level

  • Precise and quantified system impact from changes to asset health and performance

  • Predict future behaviour based on historical behaviour changes

  • Early warning when the expected behaviour does not align with the predicted behaviour indicates an increased risk to the operation as a component within the system has changed its behaviour

  • Real-time optimisation by simulation and manipulating the digital representation of the plant to find improved operation from a production and/or asset consumption perspective. Once optimised in the digital world, execute the changes to the real-plant and ensure the actual change aligns with the expected improvement.

While the Sentient System platform is primarily a whole-of-system and whole-of-life optimisation of asset-intensive operation, it has many tools and a flexible pricing model to support APM at all maturity levels.

  • Library of Assets with self-learning algorithms and failure modes

  • Advanced pattern recognition

  • Comprehensive fundamental modelling capabilities in mass, energy and value transfer and flow, asset consumption, and asset damage.

  • Comprehensive empirical modelling and machine learning capabilities.

  • Comprehensive predictive maintenance capabilities

  • Interpretive analysis of condition monitoring data

  • Data structures to support explainable AI

  • Extensible data analysis capabilities

  • Extensible data visualisation capabilities

Sentient System has been deployed and proved as an APM solution to different maturity level organisations with a very high return on investment in all cases (5 – 10 times).

DIRIGER HUB INTEROPERABILITY AND COMPOSABLE PLATFORM

More information at www.diriger.io

Our DirigerHUB Enabling Platforms make use of the latest technologies, such as:

  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

  • Highly scalable and accessible cloud deployments

  • Micro Services and Containerisation

  • PWA (Progressive Web Applications) for mobile and offline capability

  • Our Integration, Business Rule, and Workflow platform technology

  • Design Thinking approach to Persona and Process-based low cognitive load UI/UX (Composable User Interface and Experience)

  • Interoperability aligned with the OIIE and ISO 18101

  • Multi-system synthesis in real-time with full audit and error recycle capabilities

  • Centralised security and User Profile controls (Delegations or Authority) that standardise across all systems-of-systems capability

  • Composable Customer-specific UI/UX configuration capability so that there are ‘No more Gaps’ in solution deployment and reduced Customer Technical Debt.

ODBOK METHODOLOGIES

More information at www.odbok.cloud

Within an interoperable digital ecosystem, the quality of data and alignment of data structures is paramount between all the digital service providers. While each vendor has its own data structures and ways of ensuring the quality of the data used, a methodology to support all vendors and solutions reduces the effort required and improves the quality of a combined solution. It also provides for the addition of new vendors into the ecosystem with minimal rework.

Odbok Pty Ltd was established to assist companies to align, integrate and industrialise the data within their systems in readiness for Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 Automation initiatives.

We do this by:

  • Maintaining a technology agnostic reference architecture.

  • Continuous optimisation of our Data Foundation Methodology

  • Collaborating across multiple disciplines and sharing outcomes with our customers.

  • Maintaining our focus on ensuring high-quality data outcomes for our customers.

  • Leveraging the years of experience and knowledge across our SMEs.

The Odbok Methodology is a Systems and Data Lifecycle methodology, and it will be refined specifically for the customer to encapsulate their objectives and constraints. The Odbok methodology is designed to be implemented in either a greenfield or a brownfield situation, enabling the customer to determine the pace at which remediation and alignment occur. It orchestrates project and maintenance changes across all systems to maintain the integrity of business objectives, compliance, and operations data.

ODBOK METHODOLOGY OVERVIEW

Govern: Develop and maintain your system and site agnostic references, e.g. Attributes, measures, UoM, classifications, functional locations, standards, formulas and aggregations.

Design: Develop and maintain your system and site agnostic template catalogues, e.g. Asset templates, Hierarchy templates and composite templates.

Build: Develop and maintain your site and system-specific implementations and changes as change packages.

Deploy: Orchestrate the deployment of your changes in concert with the other associated works being done.

Monitor: Monitor the changes that are deployed or implemented directly. Capture data from the system for input into the quality and health statistics.