Just like us humans, having a regular health check for your assets is essential to getting the most out of them. John Renick, Partner Solutions Director for Meridium, explains why performing a health check is essential to gain a better understanding of your assets and how to use them to their optimal level.

Imagine the significant health-related benefits of having a wristband which would automatically and continuously monitor your health-related data like blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol, ketone and liver enzymes, white and red blood cell counts, daily exercise, caloric intake, bone density, body fat, etc. Then, via pre-defined policies, the wristband would automatically alert you as to when and what actions you need to take to reduce your risk of an unexpected health-related event. It’s fair to assume that if we followed the technology’s recommendations, many of us could expect to increase our life-expectancy.

While medical technology is catching up to offer us these amazing health benefits, technology capable of performing a “health check” for your assets is already available.

The good news is most companies will not need to start from scratch to perform an asset health check. Many organizations already have an infrastructure and processes in place to capture key asset information. In such cases, the challenge lies in the effective integration and synthesis of their asset data.

This is where an Asset Performance Management (APM) system can come into play to integrate and align asset data to monitor and evaluate asset conditions and alert asset owners of potential risks.

Before you break out the stethoscope and start performing your own asset health check, here are three steps to follow to ensure the ongoing health of your assets.

1. Understand Your Asset Characteristics
The first step in achieving a better view of asset health is to know and understand what assets are in the field and their characteristics. In most organizations, the CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) is the master repository for asset data. By integrating with the CMMS, the APM system retrieves the master list of assets and keeps it updated as changes take place, making sure that all assets in the production environment are recognized and accounted for.

2. Assess Your Asset Criticality
Once assets have been identified, the next step is assessing their criticality. Which assets pose the highest risk in terms of safety, the environment, production and cost? While there are various methodologies used to determine criticality, a single methodology or process must be uniformly applied across all assets.

3. Define Your Asset Strategies
With asset criticality defined and understood, you can begin to define intelligent asset strategies, which include all plans, actions, parameters and notifications taken to monitor, care for and ensure the proper function of production assets in as much of an automated way as possible. These strategies should be generated for and applied to the most critical pieces of equipment first. Then, through the use of templates, these strategies can be easily applied to less critical assets. New analyses and analysis components can be created from existing templates, and any existing analysis or analysis component can be used to create a new template. Using the analysis templates offered within the APM system to define the asset strategy assures standardization and data integrity, both important to achieving a better view of asset condition.

Odds are that a shortage of data is not the impediment to poor asset performance. However, using asset data to develop a current and future snapshot of asset health is a good step towards a “healthy” asset.

John Renick is the Partner Solutions Director for Meridium, Inc. He has over 14 years of experience working with asset intensive industries. In his current role, John oversees Meridium’s partnerships and ensures that those partnerships deliver valuable solutions. Meridium are a sponsor of Mainstream Conference, the asset management conference, celebrating the leadership, technology, ideas, and innovations that are literally transforming Asset Management.

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