Assets are the lifeblood of the energy industry. As new layers of change – including deregulation, new legislation, new market entrants, new consumption patterns – impact the sector, enterprise asset management becomes key to the profitability and long-term sustainability for many oil and gas and utility companies. Effectively harnessing the data and information within the organization is pivotal to success, and that can prove a challenge.
As an example, it’s unsettling to think just how much of the infrastructure within the utility industry is over 50 years old. Aging infrastructure is liable to fail, which can lead to power outages – Electric Contractor notes that 36.7 million people in the US were affected by power outages in 2017, double the figure in 2015. Power outages can have major consequences for companies: A Vanson Bourne survey showed over one in five utility companies have reported they lost business as a result of power outages.
The benefits of enterprise asset management
Infrastructure modernization is a long process. In the meantime, effective enterprise asset management is essential for companies to optimize their existing assets and improve decision-making. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lists its benefits for utility companies as:
- Prolonging asset life and improving decisions about asset rehabilitation, repair, and replacement
- Meeting consumer demands with a focus on system sustainability
- Setting rates based on sound operational and financial planning
- Budgeting focused on critical activities for sustained performance
- Meeting service expectations and regulatory requirements
- Improving responses to emergencies
- Improving the security and safety of assets
- Reducing overall costs for both operations and capital expenditures
Today, many energy companies are struggling to realize the benefits of asset management. Three quarters of the respondents to a Vanson Bourne survey admitted that they didn’t know when assets were due to be replaced and 71% said they didn’t know when assets were due for maintenance.
Enterprise asset management: driven by content
No energy company is short of data or information. In fact, there’s so much of both that making sense of it and deriving value from it becomes increasingly difficult. Over time, the content within energy organizations has become siloed, difficult to access and use. This leads to engineering documentation that’s out-or-date, which increases the time and cost of repairs and maintenance, and the complexity of collaborating with internal teams and external contractors.
For enterprise asset management to be successful, companies must find a way to bring their content together and make up-to-date and accurate information available where it’s needed. An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution such as OpenText™ Extended ECM for Engineering can help drive enterprise asset management in these key areas:
Capital Projects
Asset management begins with the initial greenfield and brownfield projects. The more efficiently the project and asset documentation is created and developed, the more effective the handover of deliverables to the operations and maintenance teams. This begins with template-driven project creation through document development and review, transmittal management and the creation of an asset content vault.
Asset Operations and maintenance
Asset operations and maintenance revolves around the effective management of all information and documentation within an asset content vault. It’s vital that change is properly reflected and auditable so that document integrity is maintained at all times. This is especially true within concurrent engineering projects where many parts of the process are taking place simultaneously and are handled by different internal and external parties.
Integration with maintenance management
Asset information can automatically trigger and populate maintenance work orders. The engineer can easily access the order from a dashboard-driven workspace created for that order and have all relevant information available on a single screen. Once the work is enacted, a content platform can automatically archive the content produced by the maintenance system.
Drone and video management
Drones are increasingly being used to improve the maintenance of assets, especially in hazardous or difficult to reach locations. It is much more cost-effective to use drones to monitor miles of pipelines or refinery stacks than sending teams of field engineers. However, the video and other environmental information from drones still has to be captured, edited, managed and made available. Combining industry leading technologies from OpenText, such as OpenText™ Digital Asset Management, Extended ECM and Digital Process Automation facilitates the process of integrating drone and video content into your maintenance and operations processes.
Supplier integration
A content management repository provides the basis for efficient exchange and collaboration of large volumes of content with external parties. Combining the repository with an external, cloud based, transmittal portal, such as OpenText™ Leap Supplier Exchange or OpenText™ Core provides the control, tracking and security to effectively collaborate with your external suppliers.
Content services: asset information where and when it’s needed
Without effective engineering and asset information management in place, executing large engineering projects and operating assets can result in significant risk to scope, schedule, cost and non-compliance. OpenText Extended ECM for Engineering provides a single, authoritative repository for storing and controlling engineering documents and work processes.
It also delivers a new generation of Content Services capabilities that allow the information to be made available where and when the user needs it – even within their front-line applications.
Persona-driven dashboards and streamlined work processes make finding information, getting work done, and controlling risk efficient and effective. Content is always correct and available across your ecosystem of internal teams and contractors for smooth and efficient asset management.
Enterprise asset management and operational excellence in energy are among the topics at OpenText™ Enterprise World 2019 in Toronto in July. Reserve your place today.
