Overview

Production facilities often face problems related to recurring equipment failures, including:

• Unplanned downtime.
• The inability to maintain planned production rates.
• High costs of fixing problems that result from equipment failures.
• Threats to employee and environmental safety.

Data related to equipment failures and the impact that they have on a facility can be recorded using a data collection tool. Collecting failure data alone, however, cannot prevent the same problems from occurring in the future. What production facilities need is a tool that will analyze the failure data to help decrease the number of equipment failures, which will in turn increase profit margins.

The APM system fulfills this need.

You can use APM tools to analyze and process data that is collected in and transferred from an external system (e.g., SAP). After the data exists in APM, it can be analyzed to determine the state of your equipment and the reliability, trends, potential risks, and probability of failures associated with that equipment. Based on the gathered data and associated analyses, you can map out the impact of projected changes and then make recommendations and suggest strategies for future equipment maintenance.

There are two environments in which you may access the cloud-based product offering of APM. Depending on your specific tenant configuration, you may be using the Cloud APM environment or the Legacy Predix APM environment.