“Technology will not replace you or your people. People using technology will. Adopting a culture of innovation in which you encourage your teams to utilize new tools and technologies to improve how they work is critical.”
~ Matthew Byrd, Founder and President, Reality Capture Network
The landscape of everyday maintenance is shifting, fast. There are many different views on what maintenance will look like in just a few years. Some predict robot-fixers, some espouse augmented reality and self-healing machines, others believe that full automation will be the new norm or advanced warnings via sensors and integrated systems.
What they all agree on is that the conversation will have moved from digital transformation and preventive maintenance to fully predictive and efficient maintenance. The expectation is that greenfield and brownfield sites will be digitized. If you’re not on that path, you are now falling behind.
In the three prior posts in this series, we’ve addressed the current challenges, and the way of the future for the working daily lives of maintenance planners, reliability engineers, and business analysts in heavy-asset industries.
Asset owners, managers and C-suite executives today are under increasing pressure to not only explore digital transformation through adoption and acceleration of best practices, but to implement it in a way that has a strong and rapid impact. They're measured on a multitude of key performance indicators including productivity, profitability, safety, cost reductions, asset utilization, mean times to repair - and between failure, annual failure rate, inventory turn-over ratio, and more.
They are responsible for monitoring and managing every aspect of the facility at a high level, not just maintenance. The challenge with maintenance specifically for these owners is that corrective maintenance is significantly higher than preventive maintenance. There are numerous industry sources citing different values to illustrate this point:
Emergency (corrective maintenance) is 3-5 times as expensive as well-planned preventive maintenance
Corrective maintenance costs 70%-90% of total maintenance costs when user costs (e.g. train delays) are included as a corrective maintenance cost
Preventive maintenance at industry-recommended standards led to a 545% return on investment compared to not doing any preventive maintenance
Let’s consider a few of the day-to-day challenges faced by asset owners and managers in heavy-asset industries:
Data scarcity has turned into data abundance seemingly overnight, and lack of transparency along with disparate silos of information are costing the company time and money
Tight timelines and budgets constantly place additional pressure on the requirements of reducing costs, improving effectiveness and efficiencies, and lowering risks
Uncertainty about current “best-practices with technology” combined with a lack of time to educate users on the benefits of technology. This is further compounded by difficulties in getting internal buy-in from users who are satisfied with the status quo
The pressure to deliver is extraordinary, and in the case of tier 2 energy companies, this is exacerbated by the drive to catch up to tier 1 companies who have been using more advanced digital technologies for decades.
These owners and managers are under-the-gun, and the root of their concern is threefold:
Projects consistently go over-budget and run behind schedule. Teams are constantly pivoting and adjusting the original plan.
Teams simply do not know what’s in the field and need to constantly send people out to plan for maintenance and ensure asset health.
Current digital investments are confusing and the team doesn’t know how to use the tools effectively, they are resistant to change and in many cases fear that technology will usurp their roles.
How digital twin software can help: Data aggregation and contextualization
Data ingestion, aggregation, and unification is a core and critical benefit of a data-rich digital twin. Business information systems and data that is locked in third party systems and applications can be unlocked and made available. This allows for:
Access to all data attributes and work packages that are normally present on siloed data repositories
Remote collaboration and communication with different personnel from maintenance and operations to understand equipment history, performance criteria, and more
The alignment of schedules, avoidance of field clashes, optimal vendor selection, and optimized supply sequencing
Access to real-time and up-to-date information to create estimates, make forecasts, and keep track of inventories for production goals
The aggregation of quality exhibits and construction completion records, including outstanding punch items and deficiencies
Ease in locating, monitoring, recording, collecting, printing, scanning, and uploading information for further analysis and distribution
Seamless, quick production of reports and sharing information with concerned stakeholders
Efficient, accurate, safe remote working conditions for the workforce
Business continuity
Real time monitoring of progress towards attaining reduction targets
The digital twin enables the visualization and unification of all your engineering, geospatial, planning, scheduling and operational data in 2D and 3D in a single web-based interface. It also facilitates remote work and collaboration, and contributes to all your efficiency goals including safety, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction, cost reductions, and bottom-line profitability.
A digital twin allows you to:
Reduce the requirement for travel for all internal stakeholders and 3rd party contractors by 50%
Deliver asset information to every stakeholder with unlimited users; reduce existing software license spend by 50%
Prepare your organization for AI/ML adoption by aggregating, verifying and labeling current data sets in the context of a 3D viewer. 10X+ ROI for productivity
Unlock new use cases by delivering a data-rich digital twin to your entire organization with unlimited user access.
Realize the potential of your existing asset information by aggregating it in the context of a simple to use 3D visualization platform. Democratize the existing data silos (CAD, GIS, IoT, SCADA, ERP )
Leverage a SOC2 Type 1&2, highly secure cloud application with no software or hardware.
Specifically, VEERUM has helped asset owners achieve the following gains:
30% improvements in productivity
50% reductions in field exposure
25% reductions in field costs
20% reductions in CO2 emissions
20% improvements to most core business KPIs
Secondary gains
Secondary gains associated with those outcomes include:
Enabling business continuity
Empowering teams to work more efficiently, accurately, and safely from anywhere in the world
Facilitating digital adoption across sites while attracting and retaining a top talent workforce
If you found this to be of interest:
Download the full white paper on Visualizing the Future of Operations, Maintenance and Reliability, or Digital Adoption and Acceleration in Operations and Maintenance
Join a monthly live demo session to see VEERUM in action with industry use cases, or
Book a private demo to discuss your business in detail