Why Implement APM: 10 Benefits

In the industrial sector, it is very important to define a correct maintenance strategy according to the industry to which the company belongs, the type of plant, the production processes to be carried out, and the facilities.

It is very important to emphasize that the maintenance strategy will be defined according to the particular needs of each company, and therefore it can be stated that different facilities require different maintenance strategies.

Among the different maintenance strategies, we find the following strategies: corrective, preventive, conditional, predictive, reliability, etc. We will talk about them in future posts.

Currently, the digital transformation of organizations is facilitating the implementation, execution, and supervision of all areas of companies, including the maintenance area. In this area, the set of technological solutions of industrial software for digital transformation is encompassed under the name of APM: Asset Performance Management. You can read more about what APM is in the Post What is APM: Asset Performance Management?

Implementing an APM 4.0 strategy in today’s organizations, where all business areas are being digitized and millions of data are collected per second to be exploited, is essential to be competitive in today’s markets.

Implementing this strategy provides numerous benefits for the organization, but below, we will list the 10 main benefits of implementing APM solutions in Industry 4.0:

1. Reduction of maintenance costs

The set of technological solutions included in APM 4.0 allow to substantially reduce the maintenance costs of organizations thanks to various factors. Among these factors, we can list: reduction of preventive maintenance, reduction of large-scale corrective maintenance thanks to real-time predictive maintenance, increased efficiency of field technicians, agile decision-making based on real data, etc.

2. Increase the lifespan of assets

By monitoring assets in real time, being able to anticipate their failures before they can suffer serious damage or cause damage to equipment in the same system, as well as performing the necessary preventive maintenance when appropriate, the useful life of the assets is increased.

3. Increases ROI (Return of Investment)

Thanks to the increase in the useful life of the assets, it will be possible to obtain a greater ROI from the assets of our organization.

4. Reduction of unnecessary preventive maintenance

By implementing the correct maintenance strategy for each of the assets and monitoring them in real time, unnecessary preventive maintenance is reduced. The decision-making of the appropriate strategy is carried out thanks to a study of the possible strategies, carrying out a Risk-Based Maintenance planning (RBM).

5. Early detection of failures

By performing predictive maintenance on our critical assets, applying advanced pattern recognition (APR) and technology such as machine learning, as well as a condition-based maintenance strategy, we will be able to anticipate failures in our equipment and systems.

6. Decrease of unscheduled shutdowns or “downtimes” and power outages or “outages”

The set of APM 4.0 solutions allows organizations to perform advanced and real-time maintenance, which will allow them to have all the necessary information to anticipate failures and, therefore, unscheduled “downtimes” and “outages”.

7. Ensures the availability of assets to meet production objectives

As a consequence of the points described above, the availability of all the assets of our organization will be increased, as well as the production capacity of these, which will allow the production team to reach and exceed production objectives more easily.

8. Contributes to the continuous improvement of the efficiency of equipment and personnel

One of the main objectives of the APM 4.0 strategy is to empower the technical field staff, for this it is possible to implement various solutions for mobile phones and “tablets”, as well as the implementation of solutions with Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology, to cover various needs. With the deployment of these solutions, the technical staff will have all the necessary information in the field (manuals, plans, protocols, videos, …), real-time data from the equipment, as well as the protocolization and standardization of best practices for the development of their daily professional activity.

9. Ensures regulatory compliance for safety and environmental issues

Having a computer-assisted maintenance management (GMAO) tool will allow our organization to manage, control, and execute all maintenance actions when appropriate. This will ensure the management of permits and documentation necessary to comply with safety regulations. These specifications may include restricted access, electrical risk or isolation of products and materials, or information on risks, among others.

10. Provides instant information to the operations, engineering, and maintenance departments to make the best joint decision

The current trend in the industry is to provide operations, engineering, and maintenance teams with the greatest amount of contextualized data. While historically work has been done on the collection of process and operations data, it is increasingly necessary to also collect maintenance data to cross both and have a complete view of our assets, from how much to how (quality), going through what state they are producing in. For this reason, organizations are increasingly betting on advanced data analysis solutions (such as Business Intelligence) and thus empower the personnel in charge of decision-making with useful information for their analysis. This allows organizations to work in the same direction and maximize interdepartmental coordination while minimizing the risk of making decisions with partial information.

If you want to obtain more information about our technological solutions, do not hesitate to contact us.

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