Asset Integrity Management, also represented by the acronym AIM, is the ability of an industrial asset to perform its function precisely and efficiently, optimizing its useful life and bringing more safety to the people who interact with these assets.
Asset management is necessary from the design stage to the end of an asset’s useful life. All stages of the process must be taken into account so that there is efficient management without major risks to the environment, people and the industrial installation of which they are a part.
In this blog, we will show the challenges that the industry faces to keep maintaining the integrity of its components and the importance of implementing asset integrity management systems in the operation.
The importance of asset integrity management
The management of industrial assets has become a necessity within complex industrial plants, especially those of Oil and Gas, Offshores, Petrochemicals, Pulp and Paper, and Mining. Many of these plants have a very high degree of complexity, making the detection of minimal failures a task that besides demanding a lot of labor time, may not always be accurate and lead to catastrophic failures. Another factor that calls the attention of managers is the aging of the structures of these large facilities, because of this, new approaches to Asset Integrity Management have arisen so the safety of the process could be preserved.
Imagine that in a large industrial plant, minimal failures are not noticed and the maintenance plan does not give them due attention, either due to a lack of qualified labor or due to inefficient maintenance management. It may also be the case that the sector responsible for maintenance is not receiving the necessary investment for the assets to be preserved or replaced in the correct way.
When this happens, the plant starts to have problems. Assets start to fail constantly, minor asset failures start to exist within the plant and production has to be stopped more frequently. Soon, employees begin to feel at risk and the imminence of a failure of gigantic proportions that can lead to major environmental disasters becomes greater. If the failure occurs, severe legal penalties are imposed, the company’s image is compromised and efforts and investments in the immediate response to the crisis will undermine the corporation’s finances.
This is the kind of scenario that no company wants to go through, but unfortunately, it is because of situations like the previous one that companies started to give greater importance to asset integrity management and seek new approaches.
The prevention of this kind of failure has become a fundamental point within industrial plants. Because of this, many companies over the years have turned their efforts to improve their asset integrity management capacity, through new investments and hiring specialized services in the subject.
The problems faced by the industry
One of the biggest challenges in the industry when it comes to Asset Integrity Management is to achieve a balance between performance, risk and cost. The harmony between these three factors will reflect in an optimized management of investment, time and resources allocated so that the longevity of the components of a system is preserved.
Access to deeply understand what are the most common asset integrity challenges
The main point of attention is to know if the assets are performing their functions according to the expected without showing wear, cracks or corrosions that could lead to the process stoppage. Thanks to the adoption of IoT sensors by industries, it is possible to have real-time access to the status of these components in a single operation center.
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Another point of extreme importance when it comes to the effective management of industrial assets is to guarantee maximum security within an industrial facility. For this to be possible, the maintenance processes must work precisely. It is necessary to fully understand the origins of the various errors, thus seeking a complete understanding of failure mechanisms.
The adequacy of the above processes will guarantee the longevity of the assets within the installation, resulting in the continuity of a production line with the minimum possible interruptions.
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Implementation of asset integrity management in industries
Because it is a set of practices with a certain degree of complexity, essential to the functioning of production, and which require good communication between the most diverse sectors within a corporation, many companies end up opting to hire specialized service providers with specific solutions to their context. The range of services offered has grown considerably in recent years thanks to constant technological developments from Industry 4.0.
Today, many of the solutions offered by the market make use of specific software that makes available the most important information of the process within grouped interfaces with strategic dashboards, using integrated systems, facilitating the access, analysis and interpretation of this data for more assertive decision making by those responsible for the sector.
In an interview with Forbes magazine, Dean Arnison, global product leader-subsea of production systems, and services at BHGE, explains how companies in the Oil and Gas sector are embarking on this digital journey. According to Arnison, industries are looking for increased productivity and reduced costs, with new business models, strong partnerships, and integrated service models. Arnison believes that most oil and gas companies are on a similar journey, looking at how to reduce basic costs while exploring ways in which digital can be leveraged to optimize asset production through a better understanding of failure and inefficiencies.
In another report by Business Wire, the estimated growth value of the Asset Integrity market is US $ 15.4 billion until 2025. These trends show us how the market is positioning itself and adopting Asset Integrity Management strategies well within its operations .
The use of digital processes to manage industrial assets is a technological revolution that can reduce costs, environmental impacts and ensure safety for all workers within a plant. Its importance is already well known by most industries, which year after year increase their investments in this strategy and seek new ways to align their functionalities to the context in which they are inserted.
Conclusion
We can conclude that the use of Asset Integrity Management systems is already a prerequisite for industries that seek to keep their production operating smoothly, without any major problems and exploring greater productivity performances, respecting the necessary regulations and guaranteeing the maximum safety of their structure and their operators.
