Industrial asset management involves various asset types, categories, siloed inventories, different processes, and complex maintenance schedules across large environments. Too often these assets are too sophisticated for the average worker.
Complex asset management solutions must account for employee limitations and be extremely user-friendly for them to deliver value.
Most asset management solutions, however, don’t adopt a human-centric approach. Rather, they look at assets in isolation. But industrial assets exist in hazardous, unstructured environments that are chaotic compared to the spaces where the digital solutions were built and tested.
To navigate the complexities of asset management in real-life industrial environments, industries need replicable, repetitive, user-friendly processes and practices. Furthermore, asset management must move beyond simple equipment productivity and account for worker safety and productivity.
Solutions:
Robust Inventory Management
Managing varying asset types is a difficult task. In addition to this, industrial workforces are expected to use pen and paper forms for SOPs and other data-intensive tasks that would benefit from digitization. This analog method of asset management is inefficient, time-consuming, and error-prone.
Using wearables and tagging assets and equipment using wireless and image-based AIDC technologies such as RFID (passive and active), NFC (near field communication), and QR codes can resolve this challenge considerably.
Scanned tag identities can be used to trigger actions such as locating assets. Correlating the tag data with asset records and MRO history from external EAM systems can push maintenance notifications to the relevant personnel. Furthermore, sensor data of surroundings gives contextual analysis to evaluate how elements like humidity and temperature impact asset performance.
Feeding identification data from AIDC scans downstream into external systems transforms the asset management platform to a last-mile, physical touchpoint for asset tracking and ID. It also becomes infinitely easier to achieve real-time and location-specific safety compliance.
Using a comprehensive platform and the right smart hardware extends asset management from just inventory management to driving safety in the workplace.
Improving MRO Planning
Getting actionable intelligence for improved MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) planning is imperative for smart asset management.
Comprehensive asset management systems act as real-time data loggers to determine asset performance and health. It is important to simplify the process and enable scanning and collection of telemetry data from compatible equipment using short-range radios such as Bluetooth or NFC.
Asset management can improve MRO planning by analyzing telemetry data in real-time, and then forward this data to third-party EAM systems. This helps the asset management system identify and ensure that the right PPE and tools are available for the specific MRO job.
Preventive Maintenance
Proactively identifying potential or emerging issues and ensuring accurate maintenance schedules improves preventative maintenance.
However, given asset varieties and volume, industries need systems that connect assets and information seamlessly. Industries need to collect timestamped and location-tagged data to identify potential hotspots and anomalies on-site.
Organizations drive preventive maintenance by utilizing sensor data collected over time. Connected sources on-site employ advanced analytics to determine emerging trends and identify early lead indicators of potential issues.
Visualization of analytics, such as heat maps and customizable reports, is also important to drive better asset management and security. These can help identify latent and hidden issues by providing a multifaceted view of the health of assets. Industrial operations need systems that superimpose asset identities and current locations overtop of analyzed data.
Conclusion
Currently, asset management in industrial domains is focused on asset-turnover ratio, ease of locating assets, and timely maintenance. Smart asset management solutions account for all these variables including worker and spatial safety. Given the complexity of the task, solutions need to be human-centric to deliver multi-faceted value.
About Guardhat
Guardhat is pioneering end-to-end connected worker safety solutions for industrial workers. We offer cutting-edge, wearable technology; a proprietary connected worker platform – unrivaled in its ability to ingest, manage and analyze unstructured data; easy to deploy monitoring and reporting software; and a growing system of partner integrations.
Guardhat enables companies to monitor worker location, health, and work environment to shorten reaction time and help proactively solve safety challenges. We hold 15 patents in real-time location systems, wearable solution design, and connected worker software. If you are interested in our connected safety solutions – including situational awareness, environmental and biometric monitoring, multi-modal communication, RTLS, Covid-19, and other advanced technology solutions – contact us to arrange a demo.
