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APM involves people, processes, and technologies to improve the uptime with higher revenue and longevity of physical assets to conserve cash while reducing operating costs and business risk. APM helps assure assets have the needed capability for optimal operating performance to meet today’s dynamic business and production goals with high customer satisfaction for on-time delivery and product quality. This APM approach becomes a means to systematically improve key metrics like uptime, mean time to repair (MTTR), asset longevity, on-time shipments, quality/yield, and safety. Success with these metrics leads to improvements in executive metrics like revenue, margin, customer satisfaction, work-in-process (WIP) inventory, and return on assets (ROA).
APM improves the reliability and availability of physical assets by synchronizing the asset lifecycle management functions including reliability, maintenance, inspections, and information management. APM acts to optimize the performance of physical assets in their operating ecosystem, typically employing a digital thread throughout the asset lifecycle, supporting digital twins for assets and asset groups, supporting connected workers, and the network of parts and service providers.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) with advanced analytics, offers new opportunities to improve the reliability of industrial assets, enabling owner-operators to progress toward no unplanned downtime, which many consider to be the ultimate objective for maintenance and operations.
Preventive maintenance assumes a failure pattern that increases with age or use. Unfortunately, this applies to only 18 percent of assets. The other 82 percent of assets display a random failure pattern. In contrast, predictive maintenance (PdM) approaches employ near real-time equipment and process data to predict failure. PdM combines multiple data sources with analytics to predict failure with a higher degree of confidence and low false positives.
Typical benefits of proactive maintenance include improved uptime, asset longevity, maintenance cost control, and safety. Industrial organizations should review their asset management strategy and consider increased adoption of condition monitoring and predictive maintenance solutions. ARC Advisory Group recommends that users consider a pilot project for proactive maintenance with analytics – especially for complex assets or a common asset type.
Combining IoT with analytics and automated business process enables new, higher levels of maintenance effectiveness and maturity. IoT allows organizations to reduce data quality issues associated with manual inspections and move to automated data collection. This vastly improves data quantity and integrity, enabling new maintenance strategies. ARC classifies maintenance maturity into five types or levels: reactive, preventive, condition-based, predictive, and prescriptive.
Strategy |
Description |
Asset Attributes |
Car Analogy |
Reactive |
Run to failure, and then repair |
Failure is unlikely, easily fixed/replaced, or non-critical |
Radio |
Preventive |
Service in a fixed time or cycle interval |
Probability of failure increases with asset use or time |
Replace engine oil every 5,000 miles |
Condition Monitoring |
Alerts for bad trends or other rules-based logic using a single data value |
Assets where a component failure cascades into big $ losses |
Oil pressure, coolant temperature indicators |
Predictive (PdM) | Equipment specific algorithms or machine learning. Multivariable | Critical assets where unplanned downtime has business impact | Battery Management System in electric cars |
Prescriptive |
Model and knowledgebase identifies an issue and what to do for repair |
Complex assets requiring advanced skills |
Dealership-level diagnostic equipment |