While I have a deep background in motors, Motors@Work is my first foray into the fields of asset management and software development. The past several months exposed me to a whole new flavor of alphabet soup: ERP, EAM, APM, AIP, PAS, CMMS, and a dozen other acronyms. I think I’ve seen nearly every letter combination short of XYZ!
Gartner’s March 2017 Market Guide for Asset Performance Management helped me to understand the asset management technology ecosystem — i.e., how all these acronyms relate to each other. This post summarizes Gartner’s classification of the asset management ecosystem and describes how Motors@Work fits into the asset management environment.
The EAM ecosystem
Over the approximately 25 years since its inception, the asset management technology market has become increasingly splintered and specialized. Software packages typically provide one or more of the following services:
- ERP | Originally developed in the manufacturing industry to manage material resources more efficiently, enterprise resource planning refers to integrated financial management software. While some ERP packages advertise that they “do it all,” most ERP systems effectively manage finances, accounting, material inventories, supply chains, and certain HR-related functions (e.g., timesheets & payroll) yet struggle with maintenance-focused tasks. ERPs have the widest adoption in product- and service-centered industries.
- EAM | Arising from the power generation, mining, oil & gas, defense, and mass-transit industries, enterprise asset management software originally focused exclusively on the maintenance, reliability, and operation of physical assets. Today, EAM packages also include engineering, maintenance, operations, materials management, purchasing, and accounting functions in order to capture assets’ total lifecycle costs; as a result, EAMs dominate in asset-intensive industries.
- AIP | Most often used by utilities, asset investment planning software uses asset condition, maintenance costs, and criticality to determine long-term capital investment plans. AIP software typically collects data from an organization’s EAM system and sends the developed plans to its ERP system.
- APM |Asset performance management software provides visualization and analytics that help organizations optimize their assets. APMs provide condition-based and predictive maintenance triggers that generate work orders in the organization’s EAM; they also perform risk management and reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) analyses that feed into AIP plans. Gartner reports that APMs have been shown to “deliver measureable improvements in availability, as well as reduce maintenance and inventory carrying costs,” making them a must for asset-intensive industries.
Rather than competing, these software programs complement each other. Each provides a different perspective on operations and health; they also optimize around different criteria. For example, as Daryl Mathers put it in Plant Services, “ERP systems… include a just-in-time style of thinking — while EAM systems [take] a just-in-case approach.” The figure below — my variation on Gartner’s Figure 1 — shows how these services relate to each other.
Motors@Work: an APM?
Gartner goes on to describe two classes of APMs: platform vendors and asset analysis vendors. Platform vendors provide comprehensive data aggregation and analysis services and are often used in organizations requiring regulatory compliance with one or more ISO standards. However, Gartner notes, not all buyers need the complexity and high cost of comprehensive APM platforms.
Targeted solutions, like Motors@Work, with deep knowledge in specific equipment and industries serve organizations who don’t need a comprehensive APM platform. These “domain expertise” offerings, as Gartner terms it, develop solutions around use cases that are specific to particular industries and equipment types.
Motors@Work provides asset, reliability, and energy intelligence for motor-intensive industries, particularly water/wastewater utilities, power generation, pulp & paper, oil & gas, chemicals, and food & beverage. And since motors account for up to $95 out of every $100 spent on electricity in some industries, we translate our technical analyses into dollars and cents — providing recommendations that consider the total lifecycle cost of alternative actions.
Which solution in the EAM alphabet soup fits your business? Contact us today to schedule your demo of Motors@Work’s and learn how you can improve the performance of your motor-driven systems.