Asset efficiency is important to a manufacturer’s bottomline
A recent study on the maturity of asset efficiency practices from Infosys and the Institute for Industrial Management (FIR) at Aachen University revealed that 85% of manufacturing companies globally are aware of asset efficiency, but only 15% of the surveyed firms have implemented it at a systematic level.
These companies said that some current challenges include lack of instrumentation of the assets, missing real-time data analytics, lack of context due to missing information from other systems, and lack of a holistic focus with other aspects of efficiency like energy, utilization, operations and serviceability.
Infosys and other supporting companies including Bosch, GE, IBM, Intel, National Instruments and PTC have launched a testbed with the main goal of collecting asset information efficiently and accurately in real-time and running analytics to allow the firms to make the best decisions.
Infosys said that an effective management of assets would help overcome these challenges, which can be achieved through asset efficiency practices. Infosys’ asset efficiency solution analyzes real-time and historical data across key health parameters and predicts the serviceable life of assets in order to decrease downtime and increase the asset utilization.
The asset efficiency solution also offers a holistic method to monitor, control and optimize the assets across all aspect of efficiencies that includes operational, energy, maintenance, information and service, Infosys said.
Infosys also said that the solution enables the companies to achieve an improvement in asset utilization and ROI by reducing the downtime of valuable assets, maximizing production and predictable delivery of service.
Many industries have assets that are critical to their business processes. Availability and efficiency of these assets directly impact service and business. Using predictive analytics, the Asset Efficiency Testbed aims to collect real-time asset information efficiently and accurately and run analytics to make the right decisions in terms of operations, maintenance, overhaul and asset replacement.
Infosys also said that the Asset Efficiency Testbed is geared toward verticals, so it can be applied to multiple solutions. The testbed is expected to be launched in two phases. In the first phase, the testbed will be created for a moving solution, in this case, aircraft landing gear. The aircraft landing gear use case, which is based on the Asset Efficiency Testbed, enables automatic detection, diagnosis, prognosis and mitigation of adverse events arising from component failures and ensures flight safety and reduction in the overall operational and maintenance costs.
In the second phase, the testbed will address fixed assets, like chillers, with the goals of finalizing the architecture and opening up the interfaces.
“With equipment and system processes becoming intelligent, virtually every activity in the industrial enterprise – say an aircraft, factory, or oil field – generates data, Industrial Internet Consortium Executive Director Richard Soley, said. “If that data is monitored and turned into meaningful insights, it gives maintenance engineers the opportunity to accurately anticipate and correct failures. That’s a powerful opportunity to maximize performance, conserve energy, reduce waste, improve quality and grow profits.”
Infosys is in charge of designing the asset efficiency solution, developing the application, adapting advanced engineering knowledge for the use cases, and supplying the Infosys Information Platform (IIP) as the analytics engine. Meanwhile, Bosch supplies the sensor technology, acquiring data from the edge, providing device management and scalability by the Bosch IoT Suite and ProSyst IoT middleware mPRM and mBS. The Vorto code generator enables M2M modelling. PTC supplies the Thingworx Application Enablement Platform (AEP), used for creating dashboards, widgets and other user interface elements, while Intel provides the Moon Island Gateway used for data aggregation at the edge, as well as horizontal infrastructure in collaboration with HP.
