One of the core issues for manufacturing companies – or for that matter, any physical asset-intensive industry -- is managing the technical information associated with the vast array of physical equipment that is needed to make the business run. It is here that the physical world (which drives the Internet of Things) truly connects with the digital world (information and content assets).
Manufacturers refer to this “asset change management” and the information management solution set associated with it is called “Asset Lifecycle Information Management.” Because the information intersection between the physical and digital worlds is: a) changing rapidly; b) directly tied to health and safety; c) critical to compliance; and d) critical to security in an age of natural disasters and terrorism, it is fraught with content management challenges.
Per LNS Research, “Whether in the public infrastructure, utilities, oil and gas, or other asset intensive industrial sectors, businesses need to rethink and redo the way they design, operate, maintain, and dispose of their assets. Today’s technology renders the traditional silo-based approaches—whether in the transition from engineering to operations groups or otherwise—an inefficient way of doing business, increasingly jeopardizing firms with a severe competitive disadvantage. The early adopters of this new paradigm can expect faster commissioning of new assets, lower operations costs due to improved asset reliability, longer asset life, and better decommissioning and disposal costs.” It is here that Digital Transformation initiatives either live or die.
Effective Asset Lifecycle Management begins with knowing the state of the asset. If you don’t know the state of an asset, you can’t know if the asset state has changed unless it is visibly obvious when it may be simply too late to prevent the change or mitigate its consequences. Your effectiveness will either be constrained or enabled by the completeness, timeliness, accuracy, and availability of the information regarding the state of the asset.
If we accept that the physical assets used in a business change over time, we also accept that these assets, along with their components, systems, and operating states -- and all of the information that documents all of these -- have a history. From a change management perspective, it is important to know and record what has changed, when it was changed, who changed it, why the change was made, who approved it, and what systems and processes were impacted by the change.
Asset Lifecycle Management requires an understanding of the interdependencies that exist among not only the components, systems, documentation, and performance of the asset, but also among the associated people, organizations, and locations that use the asset. Changes to an asset, whether unintended or intentional, propagate throughout the asset and the asset information.
The sheer quantity of information associated with an infrastructure asset can be overwhelming. Completely describing an infrastructure asset requires an enormous amount of information – design documents, test reports, inspection reports, specifications, standards, regulations, licenses, procedures, supplier information, contracts, as-built information, performance data, maintenance history, and on and on.
In addition to being extremely large, the universe of asset information is incredibly diverse. It invariably includes structured and unstructured data in a multitude of formats. This diversity spans multiple formats for documents, drawings, requirements, schedules, models, images, databases, application- specific files, engineering analyses, and more. Even paper drawings and documents can be relevant. In some cases, the information contained in a particular file or database may be unintelligible except in the context of the design-oriented software application that originally created the information, which is typically an application that has no relevance to the actual operation of the asset.
Finally, asset information must be directly usable by a diverse set of people with widely varying roles within the context of an operating infrastructure asset. To be “usable,” it is preferable that information about a physical asset be presented in a form, scope, and format relevant to the context of each role and its requirements for information in terms of scope, structure, level of detail, and format.
Asset Lifecycle Information Management It's a concept of direct relevance to any industry with lots of physical equipment that must be managed, but also one that I think can be expanded as we think about the implications of the Internet of Things.