Assets for any company are the lifeline of its business. But traditionally asset management has been restricted to managing only the life cycle cost of assets. World over E&P assets are aging and it is predicted that billions will have to be pumped into them for repair and replacement in the next decade. Also we need to consider damage & losses because of deadly Hurricanes which wipe out or severely damaged hundreds of oil and gas rigs and production facilities across the world. This impacts crude-oil and natural gas prices and threatens interruption of business for energy reliant industries. New infrastructure will be required to be built for the new exploration and production areas which need to be developed to meet the energy demands which are predicted to increase by over 50% by 2025.
The need of E&P industry is a comprehensive Asset Management (AM) Solution which helps in
- Increase the performance
- Reduce operating and capital costs
- Mitigate operational risks
- Ensure accurate financial reporting
- Increased Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance
As we all know AM involves 4 M’s – Men, Machine, Material and Money. A good AM Solution should be able to optimize utilization of each of these valuable resources. All of us are concerned about uptime of the assets with different people having different priorities. The senior management wants maximum production with minimum cost; operation/maintenance crew wants more money to enhance availability of the assets. AM services should focus on integrating people, technology and process in industries to increase asset reliability, asset utilization and service reliability using information technology.
AM practice should integrate maintenance activities and functions with systems, like CMMS, CAD/CAM, ERP and SCM. A combination of functionalities through AM enables a holistic approach in providing business solutions with an asset-centric focus through the integration of engineering, operations, procurement and service segments across the enterprise value stream. All these should be available on demand irrespective of location or geography. The picture below shows an example of integrated solution, available on hand held devices, considering various systems being used:
AM solutions have been on the market for more than two decades and range in sophistication from basic work order generation to predictive analysis of future asset performance. As of late, emerging technologies have sparked a renewed interest in AM, but, overall, user adoption continues to suffer. This is due in part to ongoing challenges like inconsistent data quality and poor usability. While AM vendors are providing incremental product enhancements to address these immediate issues, they typically fall short when it comes to enabling the next level of asset optimization: Predictive Maintenance. To achieve a predictive state, firms not only need the technology solution but also a strong foundation of supporting processes. To get there, firms need to conduct a thorough assessment to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of the current processes, especially before taking on system upgrades or new installs. While this is often a daunting task, well-defined frameworks like the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) methodology are available to help streamline the project.
The ERP vendors have been putting more emphasis on AM functionality. Some of the same economic issues that have been slowing their growth are also contributing to an increased interest in AM. AM is important to productivity and cost control and hence important to the bottom line. AM is enhanced by the Internet and new ways to use the information in combination with existing ERP functionality. However, while ERP/EAM has come a long way, there are still opportunities for the best-of-breed vendors.
The problem, typically, is not the solutions and tools involved, but rather the ways in which they are used. In many cases, employees do not take full advantage of the new systems, while companies find it difficult to implement standards and consistent maintenance processes across departments and locations. The result is ongoing inefficiency, inaccurate data maintenance, increased exposure to regulatory risks, the inability to track maintenance performance with any precision and, ultimately, the underutilization of assets and a limited ability to control costs
One of the best way to measure Asset Utilization is Overall Asset Efficiency (something similar to OEE)
For E&P industry we can have custom reports that perform calculations as shown below:
Planned Production Time = Total Time – Planned Outage
Operating Time = Planned Production Time – Downtime
Good Production = Total Production – Waste (not Included in Production Budget)
Availability = Operating Time/Planned Production Time
Performance = (Total Production/Operating Time)/Total time
Quality = Good Production/Total Production
Overall Asset Efficiency = Availability * Performance * Quality
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