The quest for leaner asset management via interoperability

The Quest for Leaner Asset Management:

Interoperablility with ERP, GIS and HMI/SCADA Enables
Maintenance Management Systems to Achieve Higher
Levels of Efciency and Increased Asset Output

A white paper by Edward Garibian, eRPortal Software Group
The Quest for Leaner Asset
Management
Ex E c u t i v E Ov E rviEw
Managers of maintenance systems continually strive for leaner, more optimized work flows for
providing asset repair and maintenance services. Gaining access to and harnessing as much
information as possible are keys to achieving this endeavor.

But in many cases, the maintenance management systems at manufacturing firms,
municipalities and higher education institutions operate in isolation from other systems that
contain valuable information. Information directly related to an asset or information that
directly impacts the management of that asset. This includes the ERP system as well as HR,
GIS, HMI/SCADA, and an array of vendor and supply-chain systems.

Integration with all of these systems and channeling the information they contain helps
maintenance managers determine more efficient and effective ways for providing services
on assets. The additional information can help maintenance staffs become more proactive
and ensure that asset maintenance schedules do not interfere with production or operations
schedules to the greatest extent possible.

In addition to benefitting the maintenance management system, interoperability also benefits
any of the inter-connected systems and their associated work flow. By having additional
information on the maintenance and condition status of assets, managers of each of these
systems can also operate their departments more efficiently since they have the ability to
make more informed decisions.

This white paper presents the benefits achieved by interoperating with ERP, GIS and HMI/
SCADA systems. The paper also presents the different approaches that organizations are
taking to address the interoperability challenge.
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The Quest for Leaner
Asset Management
t h E P r E s s u r E t O c r E at E L E a n E r M a i n t E n a n c E M a n a g E M E n t
s y s t E M s
Maintenance managers constantly feel pressure to create leaner systems. They must keep
service costs to a minimum while ensuring assets perform optimally and function for as long
as possible.

With an effective maintenance management solution, addressing these challenges is possible.
Resources can be managed and assets can be tracked so that repairs and preventative
maintenance are completed accurately and on time to keep assets functioning properly.

But isolated and disconnected maintenance management solutions prevent firms from
achieving optimal asset performance. This isolation makes it difficult to bring resource-
utilization rates close to 100 percent and maximize production.
The key to achieving a leaner system with the highest level of efficiency is to create
an environment where maintenance management interoperates with financial or ERP
applications, along with systems such as GIS and HMI/SCADA. All of these systems contain
valuable information that allow maintenance processes to operate at peak levels. In return,
the maintenance system can provide valuable information to each of these departments and
functions as well.
s ta k E h O L d E r s d E M a n d h i g h a s s E t P E r f O r M a n c E at t h E
L O w E s t P O s s i b L E c O s t
The need to integrate maintenance management with ERP, GIS and HMI/SCADA systems is
driven by today’s business and political environment, where enterprises and institutions come

under close scrutiny by business partners, customers, constituents, and other stakeholders.
Those charged with maintaining infrastructure, facilities, and valuable capital equipment must
provide effective, timely, and reliable services. And this must be done at an efficient level
of operation to help manufacturing firms, municipalities and higher education institutions
maintain lean budgets and justify strategic capital investments.
All organizations need to ensure that every asset generates maximum output. This includes
maintaining assets that operate close to 100 percent utilization or overall equipment
effectiveness (OEE) levels as well as keeping assets in optimal condition so they produce
for time periods as long as possible. Machines and other assets that break-down frequently
or need replacements sooner than expected hamper the output capacity of any business or
organization and negatively impact the bottom line.
Businesses and organizations therefore need to strike the balance between ensuring that
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The Quest for Leaner Asset
Management
4
maintenance operations operate as lean as possible while keeping assets up-and-running
for as long as possible. To accomplish this, organizations must integrate their maintenance
management application or computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) with
other systems so that the maintenance staff has access to, and can take advantage of, all
available relevant information.

M u Lt i - s y s t E M i n t E r O P E r a b i L i t y h E L P s M a i n t E n a n c E g a i n
n E w E f f i c i E n c i E s
Following are examples of how businesses have benefitted from integrating their
maintenance management systems with their ERP, GIS and HMI/SCADA systems. All
three of these systems provide valuable information that helps maintenance management
personnel function at a higher level of efficiency.
ERP IntEg R at I o n
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) integrated with maintenance management addresses

the maintenance, operational, and financial challenges of industrial or other physical plant
operations. With comprehensive and visible asset management, including reporting of
usage, maintenance schedules, and costs, lean operations are achieved, organizational
resources are better utilized, and cross-departmental functions are more closely aligned.
Maintenance management software integrated with ERP facilitates data exchange between
critical functions such as work requests, purchasing, inventory and preventive-maintenance
scheduling. Maintenance and repair supplies can be managed by maintenance personnel
while giving visibility into re-order demands, costs, and vendors to the ERP system.
Inventories can be shared and made visible for all locations to minimize redundancies and
lead times. Equipment and machine-utilization efficiencies rise by making preventative-
maintenance schedules visible to MES and production scheduling applications as well as
production-driven downtime and off-line periods for assets being relayed to maintenance.
By incorporating and allocating maintenance costs into the factory operating model, more
accurate costs-of-goods-sold values are achieved. In addition, visibility and reporting of
costs and incident details related to asset-downtime events and history allow improved
communication and information sharing between maintenance personnel and operations.


The Quest for Leaner Asset
Management
gIS IntEg R at I o n
A Geographic Information System (GIS) manages, displays, and reports on physical
entities based on their geographic and spatial attributes. When the GIS is integrated
with maintenance management, more effective management of assets and physical
infrastructure is achieved. As a potent tracking and utility planning tool, GIS improves
the functions of asset management and increases the capabilities and accuracy of data
analysis—especially in environments where equipment, facilities, and overall infrastructure
are widely dispersed.
GIS effectiveness is increased with the ability to access and utilize data from sources
within the CMMS system. The integration improves planning and decision-making about

asset conditions, repairs, and replacements. The integration also helps many maintenance
processes function more effectively. This includes work-order management, asset
management, parts and supplies purchasing, reporting, and inventory management.
As an example, responding to work orders becomes easier when routes, locations, and
proximities are accurately identified. This also drastically reduces backlogs of overdue
infrastructure service or maintenance requests.

Key components of GIS integration with maintenance management include developing
and synchronizing data and shared symbologies as well as deciding upon the structure of
the GIS and maintenance-management databases. Such integration requires enterprises
to fully comprehend their business processes and operational requirements. Only then will
the integration logically and effectively migrate from a technical endeavor to a powerful
operations tool.

The GIS/maintenance management integration should follow a business-driven approach
to ensure that the implementation supports the business requirements of the enterprise.
Enterprises that make use of the integration of these two data-intensive programs will then
achieve higher productivity and optimized workflow.


HMI/SCaDa IntEgR at I o n
Maintenance management integrated with Human Machine Interface and Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition (HMI/SCADA) systems provides a streamlined solution for
efficient handling of an organization’s assets. This includes the ability to synchronize with
the plant-floor operating model by creating assets and their associated hierarchies each
time a new piece of equipment is created in the factory automation system.
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The Quest for Leaner Asset
Management
Once assets are identified and visible, step two involves the utilization optimization of

these assets. Maintenance management software that seamlessly integrates with HMI/
SCADA systems enables usage-based preventive maintenance processes. Therefore
preventive maintenance schedules are triggered based on flexible calendars and dates as
well as based on actual machine utilization.
In addition, interfacing with the SCADA/Control system allows the “tags” that monitor
the assets in real-time during production to be used to trigger condition or predictive
maintenance work orders anytime a value, or multiple values, fall out of operating
specification. These rules can be setup to capture critical conditions before major faults
occur. The work order triggered can be pre-configured to align with the conditions that
occur and knowledge of the asset being monitored. And so very specific instructions and
notifications can be sent to maintenance personnel or supply chain partners, as part of
that work order creation event.

M u Lt i - s y s t E M i n t E r O P E r a b i L i t y a P P r O a c h E s
Large manufacturing firms, municipalities and education institutions that have millions
of dollars to invest in enterprise ERP solutions such as those offered by SAP and Oracle
most likely have a high degree of integration between asset management and array of
other applications and functionality throughout the enterprise. Interoperability is achieved
and the real effort involves ensuring that each department is automated effectively and
optimally, based on their individual requirements, perspectives, and workflow.
Firms and organizations with smaller budgets most often implement point solutions,
ie, software that addresses each area or department individually. Due to the lack of
integration among all the systems, personnel have been forced to take a spreadsheet
and paper approach in an attempt to fill in the information gaps caused by disconnected
applications.
In the case of Asset Management, this typically involves manually patching together
e-mails and phone calls that indicate how information in the ERP, GIS and HMI/SCADA
system might impact the management of maintenance. Because this involves significant
extra work with information that’s difficult to parse manually, many maintenance managers
simply forego the effort and choose to operate as efficiently as they can with just the

information their maintenance management solution contains. This prevents them from
achieving a higher rate of efficiency in maintaining the assets.
Related to this, is a simple lack of communication between departments. A wealth of
information exists within other departmental applications that can contribute greatly
to a lean process transformation. Organizations are missing an opportunity to improve
efficiencies and collect valuable information that can have a major impact on the bottom
line—not just in their operational areas but for the entire organization.
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K e y Ma i n t e n a n c e M a n ag e M e n t
S o f t wa r e at t r i b u t e S f o r in t e g r at i n g
w i t h ot h e r e n t e r p r i S e S y S t e M S :
• XML-CoreArchitecture
• UtilizesWebServices
• MicrosoftSQLDatabaseSupport
• Browser-BasedFrontEnd
• Mobile-DeviceSupport

Withattributessuchasthese,suchasolutionwill
integrateeasilywithERP,HR,GIS,HMI/SCADA,and
anarrayofotheron-premiseoroff-premisesystems
andprocesses.
i d E n t i f y i n g M a i n t E n a n c E M a n a g E M E n t s O L u t i O n s t h at
i n t E g r at E w i t h O t h E r E n t E r P r i s E s y s t E M s
The reality remains, however, that for organizations with limited deployment, consulting,
and process re-engineering resources, each department will define and implement a best of
breed solution for their business. This way, they can choose the software with the necessary
features and benefits to meet the unique needs of their staffs. This also tends to reduce
costs significantly compared to the enterprise ERP approach since organizations can
purchase specific applications as opposed to an entire suite.

But just as crucial is the ability for each solution to integrate with other systems. This is
easier said then done, but with the proper research and discovery, software applications
that fit within your IT policies and platforms, and that are built upon an architecture of
interoperability, can be deployed. A key attribute of the underlying software platform is the
inclusion of protocols such as Web
Services and XML, which facilitate
integration with other systems.
It’s also helpful to deploy solutions
that use a well-supported back-
end database, such as Microsoft
SQL Server. In addition to
facilitating integration with other
systems, mainstream back-end
databases enable support for
additional third-party applications
that each department might need
to implement.
Another key attribute to seek is
a browser-based front-end. This
allows users to access the solution
from any Internet connection and
provides additional flexibility in
adapting the solution to different
situations.
A fully-automated maintenance solution should include comprehensive asset tracking
and condition assessment, cost reporting, maintenance scheduling and work order
management, and tracking of maintenance-related materials. From the all-important
integration perspective, the solution should address this full spectrum of maintenance
challenges with a web-enabled, open architecture.
The Quest for Leaner Asset

Management
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The Quest for Leaner Asset
Management
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M a i n t E n a n c E M a n a g E M E n t s O L u t i O n c a Pa b i L i t y
c h E c k L i s t
y Complete work order management and labor scheduling
y Capacity planning for maintenance operations
y Advanced bar code and serialization technology
y Powerful cost-allocation functionality
y 24/7 information access via Web and mobile applications
y Seasonal and time based preventive-maintenance routines
y condition and predictive maintenance functionality
y Hierarchical asset management
y Asset-amortization capabilities


A solution with these capabilities provides many business benefits:

y Improved responsiveness to maintenance issues
y Increased workforce productivity
y Minimized maintenance-related production delays
y Optimized corporate assets values
y Critical asset tracking and reporting
y Increased visibility into maintenance operations and costs
y Higher level of maintenance efficiency by integrating with information from ERP, GIS,
HMI/SCADA, and other systems
y Improved performance of ERP and other systems by providing valuable asset
information previously not available to each system

And:
The Quest for Leaner Asset
Management
i t ’ s a L L a b O u t i n c r E a s i n g a s s E t u P - t i M E
The main driver to integrate maintenance management with existing systems is to increase
asset and operation up-time. Connecting to all of these systems allows the asset-maintenance
staff to gain access to valuable information when planning maintenance activities. By having
this information, maintenance can then be managed more pro-actively so that assets perform
to optimal levels for as long as possible.
The integration also allows senior management to have a more accurate picture of how much
of an impact the conditions and the status of assets will have on production. This leads to
improved forecasts that allow the company to act ahead of time to possible threats that might
cause production to diminish and to capitalize on opportunities when production is expected
to increase.







About the Author
Edward Garibian is founder and president of eRPortal Software Group, a leading asset
management solution provider. He founded Applied Software Technologies, eRPortal’s
corporate parent, in 1989 and serves as its president and chief executive officer. Garibian also
has held product-marketing positions at Analog Devices and engineering positions at Texas
Instruments and EMC (formerly Data General).
For more information, contact:

(866) 326-2757
www.erportalsoftware.com
© 2011 eRPortal Software Group. All rights reserved.