Assets CollABorative September 2023 - APM (Asset Performance Management)

IFS Assets CollABorative - Think Tank Session - APM (Asset Performance Management)

Date of Meeting: 20 September 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time 

Bas Beemsterboer Background:

• EAM Evangelist
• Joined IFS in 2022
• Located in the Netherlands
• Comes from sales and strategy roles

Presentation:

Slide: Asset Performance Management (APM) – Gartner

• Asset Performance Management (APM) means many things to many people. I also wanted to put some definitions on the screens because depending on who you ask, it can mean different things, but I want to pick up a few of these kind of themes if you will or topics. So according to Gartner, is the capability of data capture, data integration, visualization, and analytics together to improve reliability and availability. And I think this pretty sums much sums up the technical definition of what asset performance management is and it gives us a kind of a clue into a lead into condition monitoring. Conditioned based maintenance, predictive forecasting and reliability, all of these kind of topics and whether it's your assets or your clients asses, I think everybody who manages assets has this need from his stakeholders, customer or internal to move up, to do things, to digitally transform, to provide more app time or lower cost or other value points.

Slide: Asset Performance Management (APM) – ARC Advisory Group

• I think the next definition, from ARC advisory. But they define it as a way to prioritize business objectives, which is what I highlighted in purple. In addition to reliability and availability, I think typically in the old days or maybe probably still today if you ask your maintenance manager, what's your mission and they will always say something like I am here to provide maximum uptime against minimal cost or something like that. And I think this is something that we need to disrupt a little bit, because there's a lot more value that we can get out of asset management, there's a topic and actually it's one of my, I think it maybe also said in my intro slide, in a traditional way of looking at maintenance and into more like a value driven approach or a data driven approach into really connect what we do, in a day to day basis, as to what the company wants and where the company wants to go. So in a primary enabler to digital transformation is also what it says here, but it's the business objective thing that I like the most. And then, of course, it says transformation to reliability, maintenance, execution, business performance and what have you. So, I think asset performance management is also a concept, right? It’s not a software or something like that. It's more like what you grow into doing, but of course you need tools and you need things to support you in there.

Slide: Value is more than financial benefits

• But first you would need to think about why I am actually doing it. My wife always listens to Simon Sinek. Maybe you know him. He's like a positivity guru, if you will, but he's always asking you in his speeches and his Ted talks etc, ‘what's your what’ and ‘what is your why’. And I think our what is clear. It’s software to help our clients create performing assets, but the why is often maybe not so clear or very traditional and even the Deloitte who created what they call the value map a long time ago initially focused on the companies objectives and are circled around financial things like operating margin, revenue growth, asset deficiency and expectations is the last one. But especially the first three are really how for me, how can asset management contribute or good asset management contributes to increasing the margins or increasing revenue or increasing efficiency not so much about lowering cost. Lowering cost is just a little bit sometimes negative right? Lowering cost means getting rid of people, doing less things, or maybe doing them more efficiently, but that's anyway, that's all thinking. Now that we have ESG, Deloitte is reshaping their value thinking, by adding to the strategy map like employee value, ecosystem value, customers, society, public and environment as well. And this gives us a fantastic way or a fantastic opportunity to shape asset management and to think about what kind of value it can bring.

Slide: IFS Manages the World’s Assets

• So, if I take these four, shareholder, employee, public and environment and I try to apply it to asset management, then I think that what we can do in this group is look at how can we contribute by, applying technology to make assets more available, so that we can actually produce more and therefore increase revenue or if the economy is not good at the moment for our product or our service, maybe we should look at margin not cost cutting but in the end, cost cutting is expressed ultimately as a margin improvement. But there's much more. There's talking about value of capital, whether that be CapEx, you need to acquire new assets and you need to do that from a holistic kind of life cycle perspective but also working capital. How can I create gains in inventory optimization for example. There are so many things that are touching on asset management and asset management processes that have ultimately effect on these things. Of course, there's other colours like, can we use asset management to ensure better safety or even better well being for our employees and maybe the stakeholders, our clients. ESG of course is not only about environment, ESG, if you're not familiar with the terms stands for like Environment, Social and Governance and all these topics that are relevant in the world today about diversity, inclusion, whatever, all these society topics, they also apply to us when we apply our technology to our people. And then there is risk. How can we use asset management and asset performance management to lower the risk that we have. The risk of noncompliance or the risk of not achieving our sustainability goals and the last one, regulatory non compliance. I would love to hear your opinion about these things. When we open up a discussion, I think every one of these can be expressed as money, but you have to do a little bit of extra thinking to get away from minimizing costs and maximizing availability. But how can I do that while I have the least damage to the environment? How can I use asset management and asset performance management to achieve net zero goals so that they are not only stuff that we put on our website, they are things that we can do and use the technology that is available and that we could provide also together.

Slide: Asset Life Cycle Management – Drive Value for the Circular Economy

• So anyway, value drivers and putting that in some kind of lifecycle context. I love this kind of way of looking at what we do from an asset management standpoint. I'm sure that we pride ourselves in being one of the few, if not the only asset centric solutions that is so focused on the complete asset lifecycle, from designing something to procuring it, building it, manufacturing it, commissioning it, operating and maintaining it. And if you follow this Infinity loop, you get to optimizing and then back to design back to projects back to refurbishment back to recommissioning or remanufacturing or whatever is to get this kind of lifecycle thinking really implement it. And then of course, we need to put stuff in, like effort and resources and in order to run them, we have to put energy into them and water and air and gas and steam and electricity and what have you. And then our clients generate output. But we also generate greenhouse gases, while we do that. And then, at the end of the lifecycle, we'll see things going out like, materials that maybe hopefully can be recycled or parts that can be reduced in a new life or a new lease of life of the asset or potentially something that needs to go to landfill because it's unusable afterwards. But I think this kind of way of looking at the asset already gives me an interesting view that asset management and feeling this loop and creating this kind of circular ideas, there's a lot more than just being more cost efficient or providing more uptime. I think there's much more that we need to talk about in terms of supply chain and in terms of reporting on the environment side and especially managing the energy, which is also the example that I wanted to share with you in a second.

Slide: APM Adoption by Industry – Service vs Asset Centricity

• So, if we talk about asset performance management, if we look on the left-hand side, we have service intensive business. And then on the right-hand side, we have asset centric businesses and then we have asset intensive businesses in the middle. Then we see that everybody has a need for asset performance management for taking care of assets. But the more you go to these to the right, the more prominent it becomes, the more important it becomes for our assets or our clients assets. And I think for us that also is expressed in the focus that we give with the essence group in the where do we actually focus most of our attention with asset performance is in this asset centric and asset intensive businesses make models that's probably not a surprise to you, but we happily coincide with what Gartner tells us there.

Slide: Asset Performance Management – Typical Process

• So, speaking of Gartner, with their definition repeated here at the bottom, I think if you look purely technical, IFS wants to be that player that is taking care of most of this. What we don't do is specify it on the left. We don't have sensors, we don't sell sensors, we work with companies that do. We don't sell networks to connect to those sensors, but basically everything afterwards, to ingest data, to deal with data, to treat it, to analyze it, to create predictions, to apply machine learning or all the fancy topics that belong to APM. We do with a combination of IFS cloud, or IFS Apps 10 and with another tool that I will briefly introduce to you just so that you're aware, but before we do that, I have a nice way of expressing it more in our IFS format. So that was Gartner.

Slide: Asset Performance Management – Conceptual Architecture

• This is more IFS. We have assets in the middle and the assets are supported with asset strategy, reliability centered maintenance, asset definition, criticality assessment, you can see the things on the left hand side all the way up to asset insights, which is the asset performance screens that we have inside IFS cloud, this is all EAM. This is all part of EAM. Depending on the modules, a little bit inside IFS cloud. But there's another element of asset performance which is obtaining the data, connecting it, applying artificial intelligence, machine learning to have tools to monitor carbon footprints and what have you. That is also asset management and that's maybe not so common in our thinking about what we do. We very often think about the things that we do and not the things that we can do. On the left hand side, if we complete our pyramids, then we see OK, there is a very solid asset management capability inside IFS of course with maintenance planning, asset lifecycle, project lifecycle, inventory management and MRO, supply chain, which is basically that Infinity loop thinking a little bit. But of course, field service, management service lifecycle force planning. Those are themes. It's all around the assets, right, whether it is yours or somebody else's, but somehow IFS supports you in that, all the way with like the ERP side of things where we do ESG reporting, where we do procurement and where we run projects where we do manufacturing and all these other exciting things. But where I want to take it is that if this is an asset oriented view of what IFS do, then this for me is asset performance management. It’s the combination and if I look at how Gartner defines it with the strategy on one side and data on the other.  Becoming data driven, data is an important component of the APM mix, right? But at the same time, we need to know what to do with the data and why to do with the data, why to do asset management in the way that we do it. Why do we want to apply predictive maintenance.

Slide: Asset Performance Management – Conceptual Maturity Roadmap

• So, in another way of looking at it is to help you to help our clients or to help your clients, go in this maturity journey. Every event that I go to, people want to talk about APM, they want to talk about predictive and in the same sentence that they expressed that desire, they also raised their hands when I say who's struggling with this digital transformation, and I think, somehow, we all know that maintenance 4.0 is a thing. We also know that AI is part of that predictive maintenance, but it's very difficult to operationalize this predictive maintenance, to be pervasive, to be part of your daily routines or to be part of your business as usual, it's very easy to buy. It's quite complex to deliver that idea, that concept, that asset performance management in an organization that is already running, and there's a few reasons for that. One of the reasons I think is that you're talking multiple vendors that need to integrate stuff you have. Now you have a data provider, you have an IoT provider ,you have a sensor provider, then you have somebody who is a fan of that who bought it for his need. But now how do we get that to be adopted by senior management, by finance, by everybody else's coworkers and other sites? That's where I think the challenge lies and I think change management is one of those elements. But I think one of the reasons why it's difficult, why digital transformation is difficult is because we focus very much on the technology on the what and we haven't explained properly the why to the people that control the organization that control the money, the CFO, the CIO, the chief sustainability officer, whoever, maybe the CEO who typically controls digital transformation is a theme that the value that this can provide, it needs to come from them, right? So they need to first understand that there is value. What kind of value it is? And then we need to align whatever it is that we think we should be doing in order to beat traveling in this maturity journey to align to the themes that resonate in the boardroom margin, revenue risk, ESG, net zero or digital transformation, those teams and that's not easy. But anyway, we want to help with these ideas.

Slide: Wait, what’s that?

• Our vision of asset performance management is basically this. It is to make assets smart or to buy them smart. You can buy assets, that's exciting, but many assets that you have you already have. And they are maybe dumb, right? So dumb they are not sensitized. So you have to apply technology to them, but somehow this is the vision that we have smart assets whether we bought them or whether we made them smart that can help us by emitting information that is too much overloading to deal with by a human. We need an interaction with some kind of entity that will compare the data with what the data should look like, what it looks like right now, what the strategy is for, including like what kind of asset management do we do for this asset? It's maybe redundant and we don't do anything until it fails and then we repair. That's RCM or no, it is one of the most critical assets that we have must never fail, we must do whatever we can to provide uptime for this machine, but already that is an asset management decision. Before you even talk about applying APM or smart defy them or whatever then anyway, when we have decided that we need to plan it, schedule it, where does it fit? Maybe automate all kinds of things so that we get to this dream. I call this prescriptive maintenance. That basically the first interaction with the technician is and he/she loves AI, in the end it's the vision is that we eliminate human interaction where human interaction can no longer deal with the amount of data that needs to be addressed and it needs to be judged. So anyway, disaster is averted by applying asset performance management. This is the idea and then of course I think well, we have some secret sauce inside IFS, which is the engine is called PSO (planning and scheduling optimization) that we can now also apply to manufacturing and maintenance. So we can do that particular piece better than others is what we're thinking.

Slide: APM Vision -  IFS Asset Performance Management

• So before I go into my example and then I want to hear a little bit about your examples. Data needs to be acquired, data needs to be judged and data needs to be used for predictions. All these themes are part of technology that IFS has. You may have never heard of it, but IFS acquires a lot of companies we acquire technology to deal with data just like, connect to IoT, connect to sensors, connect to SCADA, connect to historians, connect to online databases, excel sheets, you name it. On the left hand side and on the right hand side to deal with that incoming data and turn that into predictions or turn that into notifications. Better said, turn that into work that needs to be done. Maybe you heard, it was only last week and we totally forgive you if you didn't, but we acquired a company just last week that's called Falkonry AI. That's going to help us. That's here in the middle with even applying more artificial intelligence and machine learning. You see the themes there like early anomaly detection, self learning algorithms and those kind of things to the data that is incoming. So that we can interact it with IFS and turned it into one book. The pieces at the top, you're probably aware that we have that and that we work on those. The pieces at the bottom you might not have been aware that we have that in our portfolio. This is not a sales talk, but I want you to know that somehow data and what you do with it is both important and often we just assume data to be available to do predictions right. And I think we need to understand what data is to all of us, you need a user experience and user interface, to define the data to turn it into predictions, to make charts and dashboards and what have you, all of that is something that you need to do and you cannot just assume it to be there. So anyway, our vision is that these software’s are material software’s, so we can basically deploy them today. But our vision is today the integration roadmap, to have that more out of the box than it is today. Today these are integratable, but the arrows in the middle are things that we now need to do with services, and we're looking at turning that into a reality in the near future.

Slide: Digital as ESG Gamechanger: three focus areas

• So I promised you a tangible example of how asset performance management can make a difference and how it can make a difference that is not the typical example that you always hear about, which is we monitor vibration, we monitor temperature and whenever it something goes out or out of bounds, we will quickly create a condition, a condition based trigger to turn that into something that we need to do. I have wanted to put a different example in in our meeting. So that is using asset performance to drive down energy waste. I know that one of you are actually doing is in the business of driving down energy waste with how performance one of the concepts that you guys have for your clients. But of course, energy waste is a thing that we all do and as a world almost like a world of asset management professionals and maintenance, we don't necessarily see that as a thing to improve. And, this is something that I always want kind of evangelize a little bit.

Slide: Did you know?

• And maybe these numbers and maybe not, it's not the quiz. I will tell you what it is, but 45% of the world's electricity is consumed by electric motors and this was this is huge and I didn't know that. And that is everything.

Slide: TCO of a Motor

• Production, motors in production motors, in air conditioning systems for housing, office buildings, what have you, but electric motors nonetheless. And more than 95% of that TCO of that motor, if you let it run for a while, is energy. So, while we focus when we buy assets and when we put them in operations on, OK, now we have to put them in operation very efficiently. We have to make sure that they run exactly according to spec. We have to make sure that they are maintained according to the manufacturer expectations. It’s almost irrelevant to do that if we don't manage the energy that it consumes. So, on a on the longer term and I have numbers to prove this too, it's, mind-blowing, but you know what? Most of the academic world, but also the electric motor world is saying is that 10 to 15% of the energy that you put into a motor is wasted from a variety of reasons. But the only way to manage it and to mitigated is by monitoring. It is by applying sensors, looking at them, and then turning that into money.

Slide: TCO of a Motor – the math

• And just you know FYI, on the left hand side you see 100 horsepower motor is 1 motor running at 95% efficiency and that we let it run for 24/7 and we let it run for 20 years. So, this is what we have, and then in the first column in the table the energy price. So, I think today in Europe we are above $0.25 per kWh. I think in the US it's a little bit lower, but it used to be 7 cents and is no longer seven cents. And it also depends on the state. I think California is more expensive than other states, but still, that this motor cost you 10,000, it consumes 3.5 million dollars or EUR or pounds of energy over 20 years. And now if we add to that knowledge that 10% of that is maybe wasted, imagine how much we can do to make money. On top of that, that actually corresponds to 13 million kilowatt hours, which is actually, 5,000,000 kilograms. So what is it? 12 or something like that? Million pounds of CO2 equivalents that we're emitting that we can actually conserve at least 10% off on average, but even the Department of Energy in the US says that it's probably more than 10%. I have seen some studies that say between 10 and 15 percent, 20 to 30, I've even heard. But, let's say 10. Ten is huge. And imagine if we can do that.

Slide: How is this APM?

• So why is this APM? Well, excess kilowatt hours is CO2. That is dollars. We can do all kinds of things, but mostly, we need to do better asset management. But the thing is, and I think maybe you will agree, that an asset manager or a production manager or a maintenance guy is told to keep it running. To that it works when it's turned on, and that's his mission. But his mission is rarely, if ever, run it at the lowest cost to the environment. This is not his mission, and when that is not his mission, this is basically forgotten about. But if we submeter it, if we apply sensors, if we start thinking about what the CO2 E footprint is and could be, and we can even use the information that comes out with, that we sensitize, we sensor or we measure energy throughput or whatever it is on a sub second basis there's so much that we can do that we can infer from the data coming from the asset. That 10%, I can guarantee it is going to go down, maybe not to zero, but imagine how much it is. So on the right hand side, you see asset health. This is actually from IFS cloud. This is software that you can have today. It is not an Apps 10, just so that you are aware, but it's something that we have added to IFS cloud today.

Slide: How is this APM?

• This is something that is available in IFS cloud today as well, which is measuring maybe energy efficiency, seeing it go up, predicting when it goes up again. Then of course, trying to avoid that it goes up in the 1st place by applying condition based maintenance on energy consumption. It's a stupid thing, but if you would measure the efficiency of the asset, it's probably 100% and everybody is happy and the guy turns it on. It works. Everybody happy, but maybe not. And this is where we need to think, right? So what kind of value is there if we would not do this? But, in order to express that, in order to realize that, we have to look at much higher level value drivers that will entice, abort or a finance guy, a CFO to put money into your project and CO2 nowadays and ESG are important themes in the boardroom.

Slide: How is this APM?

• Anyway, the operational intelligence piece or the bottom of my architecture, if you remember in the previous slide gives us a very detailed day-to-day minute to minute, second to second, insight in our assets. It allows us to create what they call integrity operating windows. So, all kinds of variables, all kinds of measurements are coming in, and if the combination is still in a window that we find acceptable, nothing is wrong. But the moment that it starts to navigate outside of that operating window, that's when we start to flag it as something that needs to be done. And this can be applied to anything, energy, vibration, you name it.

Slide: How is this APM for ESG?

• This is one that I like a lot. Even though the charts are a little bit 90s, but it's a client in the production space who are measuring water, air, gas, electricity and steam consumption for every production line that they own, they make chocolate bars and for every Tom of product they create the CO2 footprint by using this technology. Again, the dashboards that they use are a little bit old fashioned because they implemented it a long time ago, but they used that every day, every hour, every minute to produce it.

Slide: The ESG-Centric Business Outcomes of APM

• So just maybe enough inspiration, I think. So when we see Asset Management (APM) applied to this use case of driving down net zero or driving down CO2 footprints, we can see that as an APM thing we are now measuring the performance of our asset with a specific value driver in mind, but actually it will help you identify failures before they occur, before the asset stops, you will see variation of fluctuations in energy efficiency, so it is an early warning system, it provides increased reliability obviously because if it never breaks down, you have more reliable and actually you can produce more because you have more uptime, you're reduce your footprint substantially and you can calculate all of that. And I think the last one, it says green and gold. I love that because you can be green and make money when we think about sustainability in this way. Sustainability, one kWh is only 10 or 20 cents. Whatever. That's maybe it's problem because people think ahh kilowatt hours, nothing but look at my motor that runs for 20 years. 3.5 million, that's a lot of gold, so green and gold, they go together. This was me evangelizing.

Slide: Over to you, where/why/how APM?

• Now let's talk about you. So of course, as always, we had a long introduction and I evangelized too long. But we have a little bit of time to think about if you see this, what would your ideas be on asset performance management? Do you have stuff on your wish list already? I heard somebody already say predictive maintenance. Did you do POC's? Have you done any projects that they maybe were successful or not and what kind of value did you see? So, let's open it up for discussion.

Customer Experiences (Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses):

Customer 1:

• F: We have thousands of signals and we collect them and we would like to have a visualization system when we should react. We don't want to see thousand and thousands of signals, but we want to see on the monitor when we should see it and then plan for the maintenance and we are doing just that right now, we have a project and we try to have a visualization and we have been working with that in a couple of months.
• Q: What is the Why? Is it uptime? Is it more money? Is it cost driven?
• R: It's the uptime and the maintenance when we need to do it, not do it by the calendar. And use the system to also think about should it go wrong this time? Or should it go wrong in about two years? And why is it broken? Is it going to be broken now? So, we are gathering the signals and we want a visualization system.

Customer 2:

• F: So, you said a lot of things that hit home with myself and our company and our customers. Like most of our customers that we interact with have the same goals, right, maximum uptime, minimized costs. We are a Rep for Emerson. And Emerson has a lot of this technology with their AMS suite where they can pull in valve information from smart valve, positioners, perform analytics and diagnostics. And we give reports to our customers. We're at the point now where some of our customers, especially in our oil and gas, they're just not ready for this and we have a hard time evangelizing to them why this is important. They're so used to the break fix mentality, which we hate, right, because we're getting calls at 2:00 AM on Christmas Eve because they're valve or they're whatever's broken. We want this, we think that they should want this, but yet we're even having a hard time giving it away. We've tried to do trials where we'll come out and we'll take periodic diagnostic information, put together a report, like basically a dashboard, very easy, green, yellow, red. Here's everything that's OK. Here's everything that you may want to look at it in your next maintenance window, and here's the stuff that is going to give you a problem today and we get a lot of like, yeah, cool. Thanks. OK. We’ll get back to you and then nothing. So it's like I don't know if we just do too good of a job at those break fix scenarios where they're comfortable with that and they don't want to switch from that, but like we're having a hard time getting people across the finish line.
  Q: It's interesting that you say that and how does it resonate with you that maybe we're not addressing the right value to the right person.
  R: That's kind of where we thought is we don't have the right cause, you need a champion at that customer to drive it within their organization. And a lot of times we'll talk to the leader of the power plant on site and he tells us that what his goals are and we think that we're aligning with his goals, but, if the plants running and he's cool with status quo, then he's not really the champion that we're going to need. I think that that's one of our issues and also we have to take some ownership of do we have the right messenger giving this message. I've done it in some scenarios. Our account managers will do it in other scenarios, but like I said, we've had kind of hit and miss customers biting on this. Where we do have successes in pharma. Pharma is very fourth looking. The problem is with pharma in our instance is they don't have a ton of our equipment. So this spend is not that big. We live and die by other gas. So those are the guys that have the really expensive equipment that we can go in and repair. But they're not ready to hear this message.
  F: That's a mindset shift internally, but it's obviously also a mindset shift when you're talking with external customers about the value. So it's a different message. It's a different contact typically and it requires some new thinking and possibly some upskilling on not only who's the right person to deliver that message to, but to your point like are we doing it in a way that it's resonating. And I think sometimes companies get frustrated because they try it once or twice it's not received well and then it's kind of like OK well we will just stick with the status quo. But really, that's not where the industry is going, right? So we need to learn what are the messages that resonate, how are they delivered? Well, who are the right people, and finding those pockets of customers who are ready to innovate and that's a good place to start. But obviously for you, you want it to be somewhere that represents a significant opportunity for the business.
  R: Yeah, I like one of the images you had on the slide box was about kilograms of CO2. Cause I heard it very interesting comment from one of our customers where he basically said, hey, I've got I've got a budget for increasing up time. I've got a budget for safety, bigger budget, but still have a budget for safety. I have an unlimited spend for avoiding compliance issues around ESG, so if I can turn my message from uptime to reducing emissions being a better neighbour, that might get me some traction.
  F: Absolutely. And also it gives you traction with that guy's boss because now we're talking boardroom messages, and boardroom value and I think CFOs nowadays they find they're not necessarily ESG or environment important because they love trees, but actually they see that their corporate credit rating is being affected because they are not green enough. So all of a sudden money becomes more expensive and again, now ESG and environment is a financial driver. So, I'd like to explore that offline, but we do have a lot of oil and gas clients that we have sold, this idea, this asset performance management too. So maybe we could help with somehow with our technology and our values on that.

Customer 3:

• F: We are very early in this process, so it has been very inspiring. However, I fully agree that the asset performance management should not be a target on a or an objective by itself. It has to be a tool that will support you to achieve other objectives, and when we are not capable to sell it internally, that asset performance management is a good tool for the company because maybe we cannot see directly this link about the tool and the achievements of other business objectives that we have. We are a paint manufacturer and normally the paint companies have been quite manual operated companies. But this has been changing recently and in terms of achieving flexibility, efficiency from the cost point of view and so on, every time the new production sites or when we are upgrading the current production site, they are more automated. So, if they are more automated from the process point of view, it means that first of all we have more equipment that has to be maintained, also increase the complexity, but also increase the criticality in case of a failure. So, if you have a manual filling machine and it fails, first of all is very easy to fix it. You don't need a high competency in maintenance and easy to identify what it has been broken and easy to fix it and the criticality of this machine normally is to be quite limited because you have several appealing machines. As soon as you are automatizing the filling area and everything is with robots and everything goes to a the finished good warehouse by an automated convey your belts and so on. First of all, you have more equipment that can fill. The complexity is higher and the criticality something fails is much more higher, so we cannot run maintenance as usual, or at least as how we have been doing so far. Then is when this asset performance management and the interaction of conditional based maintenance is not a desire but it's a need. So, we are in that stage we have been selling to our internal stakeholders that this utilization of maintenance and go for asset performance management and introduce this predictive maintenance needs is not a wish is not something nice to have is in fact a necessity. So now it looks like that we have created the right environment in the company with all that stakeholders that they are fully aligned to that and now we are exploring the possibilities about which is the best tool in order to achieve these objectives.
  Q: And if you look at the ultimate value driver, is that revenue or cost or uptime or compliance? How do they talk in the in the board? How do they talk about this?
  R: Well, first of all, the company, the company is lowing, generally speaking a lot. So we have to build capacity as well, OK, and build capacity, either you invest in new production sites or you take when the maximum benefit of the current ones or the combination of both and they realize that obviously just by building new production sites is not enough and it's not the best way to approach it. So, we have to take the maximum benefit of the ones that we have. So, building capacity in the current production sites is focused on increasing availability and increasing the efficiency of the equipment that we have. And in this high automated factories, if we run maintenance as usual, we are not achieving these targets.

Customer 4:

• F: We are equipment manufacturer. We manufacture ropeways mainly for the tourist industry. So, if you're a skier you probably use our product. We are in the very beginning or early stages of asset performance management. So, our customers are still mostly in the tourist industry in ski business in ski areas. In in Europe, they are mostly privately owned, relatively small companies and operating more or less only in wintertime and maybe also in summer. In North America, it's different. There, it's mostly owned by big corporations. And our business is also now shifting to regions like in Southeast Asia where we do touristic ropeways for point of interest, so these companies in Europe which are using ropes for a long time, they have built their own service teams, they operate in service, maintain everything themselves. And we as a manufacturer, we offer service maybe also for special kinds of services. But the business in that sense is quite small part and but we started now to provide all those some a software tool, it's a software platform that is managing their operations and also there maintenance activities to document everything that is required by authorities for example and what we provide is our maintenance and service manuals are provided in a digital format more or less in this application where they can manage all their activities frequency of the activities and all that stuff and plan those things. So with this they can start to measure their asset performance.
  Q: And what would be the value that your company wants to get from? Is it more service business because you have now better service or do you want to be more cost effective or do you want to just make more money or do you want to avoid fines by being more compliant and being more in control of the asset or maybe to use it to not waste energy so that your carbon footprint of running the screen lift is like going down. What is the value that would be associated with APM for you or for your company or for your customers?
  R: I think the value is to better plan service and maintenance activities. For example, we are also investing in condition based maintenance to measure usage of certain parts of the installation. Currently there is for example the grips which hold the cabins to the rope they need they need to be maintained every five years, and that means maintaining means complete disassembly and complete reassembly, which is quite a task. And if this could be reduced because we know how the condition of the grip is and how often it was used, then this would reduce cost for the customers and also other bigger maintenance tasks like maybe replacing a rope that is a big question about the asset condition. So those are things that the customer would benefit. And for us, it's an intention to get better data, better information how our installations are used and from that provide better service product to the customers.
  Q: The the cable is obviously quite a vital element of the lift and the grip too. And of course, I speak as a consumer, so how much technology can you put on those grips and is there sensors that you can put on, do you put them on the wire or you use like video or maybe how do you what do you measure on a on a cable while it's running?
  R: Yeah, they're sensors on the grips, there are sensors in the stations where the for example the grip force is measured. So we measure how often grip is opened and closed in the station. So that's the things we can measure. Then there are special sensors that control the cable quality. And that's provided by the cable manufacturer, then data that is taken from that sensor is integrated into our platform to show the customer about the condition of the cable.
  Q: Now that sounds like asset performance management, right? Then obviously there is a huge amount of avoid accidents and safety. I'm sure that this is somehow also what you play, apart from, maybe provide more uptime. You don't want people to fall, you also don't want people to get stuck in the winter, in reliability is a pretty important value driver for your customers.
  R: And there are also initiatives, for example, if we talk about energy consumption. So, we have built a system which is integrated into our electric drives to recover energy. If the ropeway is decelerating, so that should not be lost energy that should be recovered. So things like that are topics for our customers and our customers also want to reduce the operating cost. For example, we have developed a system with integrated KI to observe the top station where people are off boarding the chairs, and if a person is falling in this offboarding area, this KI identifies this and can stop the rope way to bring it to a halt and then the and operator in some roadway operations centre can check the situation and restart again and it is only one person in the rope operation Center to operate one or even maybe several installations. Currently it's required by authorities to have a people man stations in the top and in the bottom, so that would reduce a person's employee cost. Things like that that are important for our customers.
  Q: And you monitor all of that from your operation centre?
  R: Yeah, that's really in the beginning that we also try to get the benefit from that information that is now collected on the information of our customers.
  F: I was in an elevator and escalator manufacturer and they're latest generation of lifts. Obviously, he's not ski lifts, it’s just lifts in buildings, but they can basically see from their head office every elevator in the world on which floor is it. Is it going up? Is it going down? Is it stuck. So, there's a lot of technology becoming common right? Not only you have the case of how to control my own assets, but even the assets that I have produced and then sold and I can still control them, I'm not sure whether they can turn them on and off, but they can definitely also assist in, calling authorities when people are stuck.
  R: Yeah, but I think we see a good example in that kind of business. They sell these lifts. They are built into buildings and then there is nobody operating them. They are just operating themselves, but there needs to be somebody servicing them and maintaining them and that's I think the big business for these manufacturers, and therefore they are much further in this process to observe and have the condition-based maintenance of those installations.

A copy of the slides can be found in the attachments section below.

Next Meeting: 26 October 2023 10:00 AM US Eastern Time
IFS Assets CollABorative - Tech Talk: IFS R&D

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