This situation has existed for a long time in China, and it is getting worse. We can see that the asset maintenance of oil companies' gas stations has already been fully outsourced. We can also see that the number of employees in newly-built power plants and chemical plants is decreasing, and most of the maintenance business is transferred from internal functions to professional companies or equipment manufacturers to provide services. What changes did this change bring to EAM? What challenges are EAM software providers facing? This paper takes service as the main line and takes the development trend of EAM as the pulse.
Start with the basic business requirements of EAM. EAM is second only to ERP in the management software planning of asset-intensive industries. EAM system regards enterprise's assets and equipment as the object of life cycle management. According to various maintenance strategies such as regular maintenance, condition maintenance, defect management, technical transformation, fault maintenance, downtime maintenance, etc., the planning, execution and analysis management system of asset management is established with maintenance orders as the main line, aiming at realizing efficient, reliable and safe operation of assets, reducing maintenance costs and maximizing enterprise profits. Under the trend of service outsourcing, asset owners, maintainers and operators are gradually separated, and there are obviously different business needs among them:
● Owner: closely grasp the value of assets and evaluate the return on investment;
● Maintenance personnel: plan, dispatch and manage human, financial and other resources according to the usage and status of assets, and implement maintenance and preventive maintenance plans;
● Operators: Pay attention to detailed information such as the production capacity and availability of assets.
10 years ago, the current EAM system was also called CMMS (Computer Aided Maintenance Management System) system, and its focus was "maintenance", which was the level concerned by maintenance personnel. Today, there are still many software providers whose EAM products are still in the CMMS stage. However, in order to truly achieve the core objectives of the above EAM under the new business model, we must adopt a new generation of EAM that conforms to the trend. The new generation EAM has three characteristics: integrating ERP and CRM；; Support enterprise collaboration mode from the inside out; Application of analysis and decision-making is enhanced.
1.integration of EAM, ERP and CRM.
Driven by the service outsourcing model and the basic law of IT technology development, the integration trend of EAM, ERP and CRM has become very obvious. When the American Factory Maintenance Resource Center (www.plant-maintenance.com) conducted a survey report on equipment maintenance software in 2004, it was found that among hundreds of enterprises, compared with 1999, the proportion of using business suite for equipment management rose from the second to the first. In the same Gartner report, it is also pointed out that "by 2006, 70% of organizations' EAM needs will be met by ERP suppliers".
When the asset management department of a domestic oil giant recently discussed the EAM scheme with the author, it was deeply felt that EAM must be integrated with ERP. The main reason is that the asset management department, as the owner of assets, is very concerned about the value changes brought about by activities such as depreciation, impairment, maintenance and transformation of assets, and analyzes the operating state of assets and the return on capital investment. Asset value flow is managed by the fixed assets module of enterprise resource planning financial system, but its source is project management and work order management of EAM system. At the same time, there are asset accounts in financial ERP, and the physical department is responsible for managing the equipment accounts, so it is difficult to keep them updated synchronously. Only the integration of EAM and ERP can ensure the consistency of asset account and equipment account in management information system and monitor the change of asset value in real time. If the two are out of touch, the most direct impact is the loss of corporate assets. The author has seen that in the capital verification report of a large group enterprise, the loss of fixed assets has exceeded 300 million directly or indirectly due to this reason.
In addition, EAM will be integrated with CRM, especially in service asset-intensive industries, such as railways and power supply and gas supply enterprises. In some advanced power supply enterprises in the world, asset management systems have included internal and customer-oriented business processes. If it is a service provider, the customer service representative can directly trigger the subsequent maintenance and repair process when the call center system (which belongs to the CRM category) handles the service requests of internal and external customers, and reflect the implementation progress information to the customer service system. If it is a service recipient, it can submit a service request and settle it according to the service work order, and realize business process linkage with the service provider.
The integration of the three accords with the development trend of management informatization. Throughout history, it is not difficult to find a main line of replacement characterized by integration. In the field of asset management, the EAM suite, which integrates more components, replaces the CMMS system. In the whole field of enterprise management, ERP suite including owner, finance and material management has replaced many scattered small systems. The fundamental reason for this development mode of integrating many small systems into a management platform is that the integrated platform suite can provide greater IT value and reduce the total cost of ownership. According to this trend, the next step must be the integration of EAM, ERP and CRM. Many domestic enterprises, such as Shanghai Electric Power and Zhejiang Electric Power, have taken the lead in integrating EAM into generalized ERP.
For manufacturers who only provide EAM independent software, they will face a very severe test in the era of great convergence. In the same Gartner report, it is mentioned that "pure EAM software vendors are facing strong competitive pressure from ERP and EAS vendors", and acquisitions and mergers between pure EAM vendors will occur frequently.
2. Cooperation from the inside to the outside. The current EAM system has always emphasized the cooperation between the planning department, the maintenance department, the material department, the security department and the financial department. Under the concept of service outsourcing and life cycle management, more external partners have joined the asset management business, so the concept of collaboration will cross the boundaries of companies and extend to the collaboration between enterprises. A white paper of ARC Consulting Group on June 5438+065438+ 10, 2004 pointed out: "Collaborative EAM solution improves the ability of organizations to use professional knowledge, coordinate actions, avoid duplication of work, and focus on improving work and investment."
If it is a group company, cooperation is first of all the "brother unit cooperation" between group molecular companies, such as the municipal power supply bureaus under a provincial power company. According to ARC's questionnaire survey, there are nine main benefits in this cooperative mode: 1. Identify and * * * enjoy best practices; 2.*** Enjoy professional knowledge and asset information; 3. Performance benchmarks; 4. Make full use of limited resources; 5. Collaborative planning and installation; 6. Negotiate a better service agreement; 7.*** Enjoy optimizing MRO material inventory; 8. Redeploy key assets; 9. Reduce the price of MRO materials.
Collaboration also includes collaboration with external companies such as suppliers. In the asset life cycle, there are the following common collaborations:
● In the asset design stage: realize collaborative design with design companies and units;
● Asset installation and construction stage: realize collaborative project management with professional engineering installation and construction companies;
● Asset operation stage: realize collaborative material supply with spare parts suppliers; And many maintenance service companies to achieve collaborative maintenance.
● Asset scrapping and scrapping stage: coordinate project management with relevant processing companies.
From the product function, in order to support collaborative mode, EAM system will add collaborative project management, document and technical data sharing, task allocation, resource coordination, inventory data sharing, electronic procurement and other programs based on Internet technology.
3. Analysis and decision-making application enhancement
At present, a typical feature of EAM (including CMMS) system is to pay attention to process and transactional management. Under the cooperation mode, the specialized division of labor separates the operation business. Therefore, asset owners can focus on asset performance management, and maintainers can focus on ensuring the reliability of equipment.
The asset performance management scheme can set KPI strategic objectives for the performance of asset use and maintenance costs from the perspective of high-level management, and monitor and analyze the implementation of the strategy through real-time business data from the execution system to guide the daily business of various departments, thus organically linking management strategies with business operations.
The application of RCM will also be included in the analysis and decision-making. RCM is firstly a set of theoretical models, which establishes the reliability model of assets' functions, faults, fault causes, phenomena, utility, preventive measures and consequences, carries out risk analysis and evaluation, and generates equipment maintenance strategies. The traditional RCM system runs independently, and its results are often out of touch with the maintenance and execution process, and at the same time, it can not obtain enough data to support the formulation of strategies. Leading manufacturers, such as RCM system of SAP, have been included in the scope of EAM. They can formulate maintenance strategies of various assets according to RCM model, and form an organic closed loop with EAM's maintenance execution process: formulate strategies, maintain according to the results, and then generate more data to support decision-making.