Right Data, Right Time, Right Place: Risk-Based Asset Intelligence for Defence & Maritime

‘Risk-based asset intelligence’ is an emerging discipline with the potential to transform asset-intensive organisations according to Relegen’s Founder and Managing Director Paul Bennett. Speaking at last week’s PACIFIC 2017 International Maritime Conference in Sydney as part of Siemen’s Digihub, Paul Bennett said that Relegen is seeing this concept gain traction across sectors looking to improve data-driven decision making to reduce cost and risk, improve efficiency and extend return on assets.

Whilst EAM and ERM have been around for some time, albeit managed separately, advancements in item-level serialisation, the commoditisation of auto-ID and enterprise mobility, and the availability of cloud services, are generating new insights about current and predicted behaviours of assets, the impact of risks, and the effectiveness of controls – insights which will help organisations to better manage their resources.

At its core, a risk-based approach to asset management helps organisations understand what data is important and what is not – ensuring there are robust links between the data being collected and the business reason for collecting it. This is a key issue for Defence as they enter an era of greater reliance on data to increase the through-life capability of assets to underpin technical integrity and assure fleet seaworthiness.

“When you have access to technology that gives you an enterprise-wide, highly-granular view of assets, the relationships between assets, and assets and risks, along with a rigorous assessment methodology, you can run comparisons across the total business and model the effect of taking action or not. And suddenly you have a very powerful decision-making tool,” said Paul Bennett.

Risk-based asset intelligence has the potential to not only impact the way Defence and Maritime prioritise capital expenditure, operational projects, and allocate finite resources, but also bring significant value to the asset-intensive sector as a whole.

At an operational level, it can help organisations move away from conventional scheduled maintenance to condition-based programs referencing time, usage, risk of failure and other factors which improve technical integrity, at the same time as delivering significant cost savings by minimising downtime and driving productivity.

At a strategic level, the ability to create relationships between assets at an enterprise-level, and between assets and risk, enables organisations to correlate data at multiple levels to create an overall view of operational performance.

As an example, a maritime organisation operating a global fleet of like-assets – while exactly the same component may be in operation on each asset, the processes to maintain and manage these items will likely vary. Putting aside some differences in operating environments, this will almost always result in variations in the performance of these assets and the level of risk to which the organisation is exposed.

Without the right data platform, decision-makers are challenged to gather the intelligence needed for enterprise-level decisions that drive asset optimisation and maximise returns across global fleets in a timely way. And yet, this is where significant gains can be made.

Similarly, it will be difficult to demonstrate to regulators a consistent approach to maintenance, production, safety and security as organisations strive to meet increasingly complex compliance and government mandates.

What is clear, is that without enterprise-wide intelligence about their assets down to a granular [item] level, organisations not only expose themselves to greater risk, but more importantly, they will not be able to fully exploit the underlying opportunities and value that is otherwise locked away in their capabilities.

“The ability to unify data from multiple systems, disconnected assets, and bridge the gap between the management of assets and risk is a key focus for Relegen’s investment in innovation and its technology R&D program. Our ultimate aim is to give decision-makers trusted data at the right time and place to support their efforts to continually optimise performance in a fluid manner simply as business occurs.” said Paul Bennett. “I foresee that risk-based asset intelligence tools and methodologies are set to grow over the next decade and will impact Defence, Maritime and the asset-intensive sector in a highly-positive way.”

Keen to learn more about risk-based asset intelligence?

Please reach out to Relegen on sales@relegen.com or +61 (02) 9998 9000 for a free demonstration of our enterprise risk-based asset intelligence technology and discussion around the ways our platform can be put to work to generate greater insights into your operations.