Enterprise Asset Management: The Importance of Effective Utilization

http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/asset-management/?cm_mmc=agus_it...

Bob Vavra, Editor of Plant Engineering Magazine, part of Reed Business Information, talks about how critical it is, to the success of a manufacturing plant, to employ and understand how to effectively use an enterprise asset management system.

Transcript: I think one of the biggest issues that we have with asset management is not everybody uses it just yet. The technology is there, the ability to manage the assets on the plant floor are very, very real, but a lot of manufacturers have a very difficult time understanding why or even how to go about managing their assets. They dont know necessarily that theres going to be any return on investment for them. Theyve been running so hard for so long that there tends to be this break-fix mentality in manufacturing. And in reality, its very, very difficult today for a manufacturing plant to simply run to failure like that. Its not a good business practice, its not a very safe practice and it actually lowers your productivity.

I think one of the areas in service management that we look at is these are things that these assets, this enterprise asset management system, all these kinds of things are systems like every other system within their organization, but theyre not something that the plant manager intrinsically knows how to do, how to operate, how to manage. I think one of the effective things that we want to be able to see and our readers want to be able to see in an asset management organization, is how can you take them to understand not just what the software and hardware does, but how you use it effectively over the course of time. And thats a process of training and retraining, its a process of updating with new software releases. I think service management, as it is with any other part of a manufacturing business, is a major part of the success of whatever it is you ultimately manufacture.

One of the big challenges in that, of course, is that your plant manager may not be an IT expert, but they do need to be have access to that kind of solution very, very quickly. I think thats one of the things that weve kind of been championing is How do you get from installing a piece of asset management systems or energy management or any other kind of systems on your plant floor, and how do you make the most effective use of it? Its like anything else. If you dont take full advantage of your asset on the plant floor, youre not going to be able to reap the greatest benefit out of it. If you have an asset management system and youre underutilizing it and that may be as big a problem with asset management systems as anything else is that the solution is put there and people dont utilize it to its full advantage.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• IBM
• Tivoli
• Bob Vavra