Data mobility driving the future for asset management

EA Technology is gearing up to tackle new challenges in asset investment optimisation through the development of technologies that enable new and richer data sources to be accessed seamlessly within their decision support models.

The calculation of asset health and risk is an essential requirement for asset managers. It enables them to move away from traditional age-based replacement to strategic investments based on the condition and criticality of each asset. Typically, a move to this approach saves organisations in the order of 20% on capital investment, with an improvement in the performance of the fleet due to the ability to make the right investments, at the right time, for every asset.

EA Technology has been championing the development of health and risk-based asset models for over 15 years. During this time the volume and diversity of the asset data upon which the models depend have grown exponentially; huge advances have been made in data collection, monitoring and testing, resulting in many bespoke and disparate data sets. A desire to make use of this data has historically led to unsustainable, complicated interfaces with specific operations to access the data and create the structured and complete data sets required for asset modelling.

Recognising the value these data sets bring to asset management, rather than discarding data, not in core ERP or GIS systems,
EA Technology is harnessing the services of Enterprise Data Bus technology for data transfer into, and out of, the asset model system. Data can be placed onto the bus from any number of other solutions, where it can be accessed via web interfaces and utilised by the asset models. This solution uses the industry developed IEC standard, Common Information Model (CIM) as the communication language.

By embracing this technology, new data sets are used to improve the sensitivity and validity of the asset models. The richer information now includes photos, reports and previously unstructured data, to support the decision-making process. This capability puts control of the assets firmly within the hands of the asset manager.