What is Enterprise Asset Management
Enterprise asset management (EAM) is systems and services used in maintaining and controlling operational assets and equipment. This allows organizations to effectively maintain, control, and analyze their physical assets and infrastructure during all phases of the asset life cycle. The life cycle comprises acquisition, maintenance, and disposal. It also involves management of works, planning, and scheduling, environmental, health, and safety initiatives.
Though Enterprise Asset Management is often compared to Computerized Maintenance System (CMMS), EAM generally offers a wide range of capabilities and features that comprise:
- Inventory management system
- Purchasing management system
- Document and knowledge management system
- Project management system
- Labor management tools
- Performance management tools
- Service contract management
- Lockout Tagout procedures
Importance of Enterprise Asset Management
Assets come in many shapes and sizes in the forms of manufacturing equipment, transportation fleets, or any virtual piece needed to sustain production and operations. Organizations may have numerous assets based on their sizes and operational demands. EAM can help these organizations to:
- Resolve issues before they occur – an asset management software has capabilities to maintain stability and continuous operations to prevent disruption of production.
- Monitor assets – AI-powered monitoring provides insight into the current state of assets, allowing more accurate alerts and effective decision-making.
- Centralize asset information – helps managers to track where assets are, what they need, who should work on them, and when.
- Management of aging assets – with informed maintenance strategies, organizations can extend the equipment’s life by assessing risks to improve and exhaust returns on investment.
- Maximize asset utilization – real-time data collected from analytical and diagnostic tools help extend the availability and reliability in the life of physical assets.
- Consolidate operational applications – EAM helps establish a single technology system to manage virtually all asset functions across an enterprise.
- Inventory management – EAM can facilitate optimized inventory management by barcode scanning, among others.
- Minimizes downtime – EAM enables you to log in downtime during breakdowns to minimize communication concerns and costs associated with unplanned downtime.
Features in an effective EAM
- Analytics – it is used to run extended and enhanced analytics, often powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to gain operational insights.
- Health and safety – the health and safety report reduce risk by corrective action and process change management.
- Mobility – to accomplish more, take advantage of, for example, Smartphone capabilities such as photos and texts to capture information, deliver tools and documentation.
- Cloud – this helps to control costs, improve system flexibility, and decrease dependence on information technology (IT).
- Supply chain management – assets and materials used in maintenance are part of the supply chain, that’s why solutions should incorporate technologies that can integrate EAM supply chain management systems.
Before the emergence of EAM software, asset management systems were based on premise hardware. Today, they have significantly shifted to the cloud. Cloud-based SaaS solutions offer many benefits like more reliability, lower maintenance costs, and increased security, among others.
With the right Enterprise Asset Management tools, your managers can track, manage, analyze, and optimize assets’ lifecycle from acquisition to disposal. This leads to improvements in transparency and preventive maintenance capabilities, thus, increasing efficiency and lower costs.
