How to Get More from Your Software Investment

Even as industrial sites and software grow increasingly complex, enterprises are compelled to be more productive and profitable. Particularly in the energy industry, operators must respond to operational demands to reduce costs while increasing productivity, manage equipment to run more efficiently, and incorporate best practices and monitoring requirements. In short, everyone is being asked to do more with fewer resources.

Many organizations have implemented Asset Performance Management (APM) software to help streamline data, prioritize asset maintenance, and adopt best practices and processes. It’s possible, however, to take this software even further with smarter configurations and pre-built templates designed to shorten the configuration life cycle to accelerate the delivery of results.

Industrial software requires a certain level of domain expertise to derive maximum benefits. More experienced users tend to invest engineering resources to set up toolkits, dedicating subject matter experts to customize asset strategies, root cause analysis, health & reliability workflows, performance summary dashboards for insights, and other specialized tools.

But not all organizations have the dedicated resources or expertise, and even the most avid APM users sometime struggle to expand coverage to more assets or across their fleet. Developing and configuring solutions takes time and people. While building good asset health indicator dashboards appears simple, on the backend, it requires domain expertise and reliability engineering disciplines to make sense of relevant data. Furthermore, users need to easily understand historical performance data, asset-centric failure modes with operational impacts, failure consequences, and data configuration to drive detection sufficiently and proactively.

You may want your brightest engineers developing policies and dashboards for your APM, but the reality is these same engineers are critical to your front-line operations. Prioritizing the organization’s immediate needs may mean putting time-consuming configuration work on the back burner.

Another issue is knowledge drain due to retirement or attrition. Every company struggles to encode institutional knowledge before losing the people who created the processes and have an innate understanding of the equipment – it’s not possible to capture all of this.

The historical approach of only focusing on mission-critical equipment is no longer sufficient. While ensuring your most important equipment is running at top condition, you may be neglecting hundreds of other assets that end up costing you in productivity or missed repairs. Ideally, you need to start monitoring other Balance of Plant (BoP) equipment to optimize your operations and get to the next level of efficiency and productivity out of your equipment investments.

Help for the resource dilemma is available. GE Vernova’s Accelerators for APM are designed to capture decades of domain expertise and thousands of development hours in prebuilt templates for most common industrial equipment in power generation, oil & gas, grid, and mining & metals industries. GE Vernova engineers spent years developing and validating Accelerators with customers. Additionally, we collaborated with technology partners to fill in gaps so that the Accelerator Library covers a breadth of industrial assets and APM solution configurations.

Instead of building out customized APM configurations that are not easily scalable, customers can tap the Accelerator Library that includes Accelerators designed to address a plethora of equipment types and industries. Leveraging GE Vernova’s Accelerators, industrial enterprises can save valuable time, money, and scale comprehensive predictive maintenance programs, asset strategies, policies, inspection requirements, and health & reliability best practices.

For example, customizing an asset strategy takes on average 3.5 hours per asset. The engineering expertise is estimated at $150 per hour. Therefore, if a plant has 1,000 assets, custom configuration can cost more than $500,000. Using Accelerators can cut the time in half, with a gross savings estimated at 60%.

Similarly, using GE Vernova’s Health and Reliability Accelerators by asset type helps reduce the time required from 230 hours to 55 hours, which can result in on average 75% faster deployment time and over 88% in cost reduction.

Industry is quickly being reimagined. The energy transition has brought the need to operate more efficiently and get the most out of capital equipment to keep up with the high demand of change. Your teams need automated tools and expertise so they can focus on the most critical work. At the same time, an inflationary environment means companies may not have the human or financial resources to continue developing customized processes and strategies that deliver the efficiency and reliability they need.

Accelerator Library offers templates to build asset strategies, health & reliability processes, and root cause analysis - spanning comprehensive industrial assets.