Asset Lifecycle Management: How To Optimize Asset Potential

Modern businesses thrive with a holistic view of their assets. Asset lifecycle management (ALM) empowers coordinated decision-making across departments, maximizing uptime and optimizing efficiency.

We've seen firsthand how embracing asset lifecycle management can transform an organization. Take the success story of Al Fajer, a leading facilities management company in the UAE.

With over 3000 employees and a portfolio of 300 buildings, Al Fajer faced challenges common in the industry: time-consuming manual workflows, inflexible legacy systems, and limited support for a mobile workforce.

By digitizing workflows and automating maintenance processes, Al Fajer significantly improved productivity and compliance.

Their Deputy CEO, Sangeetha Balakrishna, spearheaded the adoption of a cloud-native application that integrated seamlessly with existing systems. This innovation enabled real-time visibility across operations, enhancing SLA adherence and boosting workforce productivity by 13% within six months.

This transformation didn't just streamline operations; it positioned Al Fajer as a proactive partner to their clients, rather than a passive cost center.

By harnessing the power of asset lifecycle management, they turned challenges into opportunities, driving efficiency and delivering outstanding service quality.

Building upon Al Fajer's success story, it's clear that effective asset lifecycle management goes beyond maximizing the lifespan of a single asset. It's a strategic approach that ensures optimal performance across your entire portfolio, minimizes downtime and reduces costs throughout an asset's life cycle.

This translates to significant benefits across various industries, including:

• Manufacturing: Streamlined production processes, improved equipment reliability, and reduced maintenance costs.
• Energy & utilities: Enhanced grid reliability, optimized preventive maintenance for power plants and distribution networks, and better regulatory compliance.
• Transportation: Minimized downtime for vehicles and infrastructure, improved safety through proactive maintenance, and optimized fleet management.
• Facilities management: Extended lifespan for buildings and equipment, reduced energy consumption, and streamlined maintenance workflows.
• Healthcare: Ensured reliability of critical medical equipment, improved patient care through preventative maintenance, and optimized resource allocation.

The distinct stages of an asset's life cycle have their own set of priorities and activities:

• Planning: Identifies the need for an asset, defines its specifications, and considers its impact on operations
• Acquisition: The asset is procured or constructed, considering budget constraints and installation requirements.
• Operation & maintenance: The asset is actively used, and a preventative maintenance plan is implemented to ensure peak performance and longevity.
• Disposal: When the asset reaches the end of its useful life, it's decommissioned responsibly, considering factors like recycling or resale.

In this blog post, we'll delve into the world of asset lifecycle management, exploring its core principles and practical applications.

What is asset lifecycle management?

Asset lifecycle management is a strategic approach that focuses on maintaining assets and optimizing their reliability and performance throughout their entire lifespan.

By implementing a robust asset lifecycle management strategy, asset-intensive businesses can achieve significant benefits, including:

Goals of asset lifecycle management

Effective asset lifecycle management strives to achieve these key objectives:

1. Scale asset lifecycle management: Whether long-range maintenance planning or complex intraday scheduling, asset lifecycle management can handle all the heavy lifting, streamlining operations and reducing manual intervention.
2. Control asset projects: Asset lifecycle management helps plan, design, and deliver complex asset operations and maintenance, ensuring projects stay on track and within budget.
3. Optimize project operations and maintenance: By minimizing equipment failure, ensuring seamless contractor collaboration, and regaining lost production time, asset lifecycle management enhances overall operational efficiency.
4. Align maintenance to operations: Asset lifecycle management helps factor in materials, resources, and duration, ensuring that preventive or corrective maintenance plans accurately reflect priorities and constraints, thus optimizing asset utilization and reducing operational disruptions.

Suggested read: How to perform Facilities Condition Assessment

Extended asset lifespan and increased efficiency

Asset lifecycle management goes beyond reactive maintenance, focusing on proactive measures that prevent breakdowns and extend the functional life of assets. This reduces the need for frequent replacements, lowers overall costs, and minimizes disruptions caused by equipment failure.

Additionally, it optimizes resource allocation and streamlines maintenance workflows, boosting overall operational efficiency.

Consider the case of educational institutes. Schools own their assets and are deeply concerned with asset upkeep, utilization, and maintenance processes. They also operate under tight budgets, requiring careful tracking of costs invested in maintaining assets.

For example, schools need to ensure facilities are safe and compliant with regulations like NFPA and SFG20.

Facilio’s asset management solutions help automate workforce scheduling, track SLAs,  and configure preventive maintenance flows. This ensures improved asset performance and longevity while avoiding fines and maintaining a safe environment for staff and students.

Incident management is also crucial in schools. Any hazardous incidents, such as a wet floor, need to be reported immediately to comply with safety standards. Facilio enables quick documentation and reporting to concerned authorities, ensuring swift resolution and compliance.

Moreover, with centralized asset management, schools can decrease downtime and maintain assets cost-effectively. Facilio provides detailed reports on asset performance, repair times, and maintenance costs, giving educational institutions complete control over their assets.

This leads to better operational visibility, quicker service request resolutions, and enhanced comfort for staff and students.

Use of IoT sensors in real-time asset monitoring and preventive maintenance

IoT sensors collect real-time data on various asset parameters, including:

• Temperature and vibration levels
• Energy consumption
• Performance metrics.

By continuously monitoring this data, businesses gain valuable insights into asset health and predict potential failures before they occur. This enables proactive maintenance, allowing technicians to address minor issues before they escalate into major breakdowns.

Preventive maintenance based on real-time data analysis

Using the data collected by IoT sensors, asset lifecycle management software can analyze trends and predict when maintenance is needed.

This enables scheduling of maintenance activities during planned downtime, thereby minimizing disruptions to operations. For example, Facilio's ALM system helped a major real estate investment trust cut unplanned downtime by 30%.

Additionally, preventive maintenance helps to:

• Reduce repair costs: Addressing minor issues early on prevents them from snowballing into expensive repairs. With Facilio, 62% of organizations saw reduced maintenance costs after implementing an ALM strategy.
• Improve asset safety: Proactive maintenance helps identify potential safety hazards before they can cause accidents
• Enhance asset performance: Regular maintenance keeps assets operating at peak efficiency.

Importance of asset lifecycle management

Any asset you buy offers peak performance during its optimum operating life. With time, wear and tear reduces asset performance. Soon, maintenance and repair costs surpass replacement costs. This is where asset lifecycle management comes in.

Life cycle asset management (LCAM) helps businesses analyze the optimal operating lives of assets and plan for replacements or maintenance accordingly.

Asset lifecycle management is a comprehensive strategy that maximizes the value you get from your assets. Here's how:

How a connected CMMS like Facilio helps

Facilio is a comprehensive CMMS (computerized maintenance management system) that streamlines various aspects of asset lifecycle management, offering numerous benefits to organizations:

Centralized asset management | Decrease asset downtime

Facilio allows you to maintain a centralized database of all your assets, including their location, condition, and maintenance history. This enables complete control over your assets from a single platform, leading to reduced downtime. Key reports include:

• Mean time to repair an asset
• Mean time to asset failure
• Cost of maintaining an asset
• Performance standards of an asset
• Asset breakdown drill-down analysis
• Depreciation of an asset
• Compliance of an asset

Inspection module | Automated compliance management

Facilio's inspection module automates compliance management, ensuring that your assets meet all necessary standards. Benefits include:

• Importing inspection checklists based on compliance requirements
• Allowing technicians to update inspection checklists via the mobile application
• Quickly converting reported deficiencies during inspections into work orders
• Configuring reports based on compliance reporting standards

Incident reporting | Improved student & staff safety

Facilio enhances safety for students and staff through its incident reporting module. This module enables:

• Recording any incident in a structured format
• Configuring report formats to meet specific needs
• Sharing generated reports with both internal and external authorities

Now, let’s look at the different lifecycle stages an asset goes through.

What are the four asset lifecycle stages?

Certain asset management lifecycle phases may be more dominant than others, depending on your organization’s structure. Nonetheless, each stage is crucial in helping you get the most out of your assets.

Assets, whether big or small, cheap or expensive, go through these four stages during their lifecycle.

1. Planning

The design engineering or planning stage defines asset requirements, specifications, and usage based on organizational needs.

The planning lifecycle stage often starts with realizing unmet needs at your facility. Then, you start brainstorming assets that may help in effective facilities management. Consider researching multiple options before making a significant financial investment.

Best practices:

• Create digital twins to boost asset efficiency across the entire lifecycle and predict faults and failures ahead of time.
  
• Take time to assess based on previous asset performance and gauge if you’ll be able to improve operations with the new asset.

2. Acquisition

The procurement or acquisition phase begins once you know what you want. You also focus on acquiring the asset within a specific budget set during planning.

Plus, keep some budget aside for installation, getting assets to your facility, and sourcing spare parts for maintenance and repairs.

Once you install assets, you’re ready for operations. At this stage, you may need to define asset ownership, inspection policies, and maintenance strategies.

Best practices:

• Create a central supply chain operation to automate inventory replenishment, save money, reduce risks, and stay efficient.
• Integrate with other enterprise systems to have complete visibility and solve unexpected problems faster.

3. Operation and maintenance

Your operations and revenue improve once you start using an asset for its intended purpose. The operation and maintenance stage keeps assets in tip-top shape with asset repairs, upgrades, licenses, audits, and patch fixes.

As assets age, you need to proactively monitor asset health to spot performance issues. Timely maintenance is key to prolonging asset life and value, and reducing instances of costly reactive maintenance.

Best practices:

• Monitor asset health in real-time using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and provide technicians with better asset performance insights.
  
• Use reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) to manage assets proactively, plan resources better, and forecast maintenance requirements before the asset breaks down.

4. Disposal

Disposal occurs when assets reach the end of their useful life. You remove, sell, re-purpose, or recycle assets during this phase. Efficient asset disposal involves wiping data and dismantling assets.

You may decide to dispose of assets because of different reasons like:

• Maintenance cost is higher than the replacement cost.
• Asset life has come to an end and the asset can no longer do the job.
• You’re adopting new technology for operational efficiency.

Best practices:

• Maintain asset history to fuel data-driven asset retirement and disposal decisions.
• Assess organizational goals to find assets that perform and satisfy customers.

Suggested read: How to measure asset reliability with a bathtub curve?

Benefits of using asset lifecycle management software

Asset management failures can lead to significant disruptions, including supply chain lags and production delays. IoT-powered asset lifecycle management software helps businesses overcome these challenges by ensuring the following:

• Optimal asset performance: Asset lifecycle management software facilitates proactive maintenance and optimizes asset health, ultimately leading to improved overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
• Enhanced quality control: By enabling real-time monitoring of asset performance, asset lifecycle management software helps identify potential quality issues early on, ensuring consistent product quality.
• Increased asset availability: Predictive maintenance and reduced downtime contribute to higher availability of assets, minimizing disruptions to operations.

With Facilio's enterprise asset management module, you realize the following advantages:

• Remote asset tracking and monitoring: You can retrieve asset information, including health indicators, risks, events, policies, and execution history, from anywhere at any time. This enables continuous monitoring and informed decision-making regardless of your location.
• Automated workflows: The software automates various workflows associated with asset management, including work order generation, preventive maintenance scheduling, and data collection. It frees up valuable time for your team to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Real-time asset shutdown alerts: You'll receive instant alerts about potential shutdowns, performance deviations from established thresholds, and upcoming downtime. This allows you to address issues before they escalate, preventing costly repairs and minimizing disruptions to your operations.

Asset lifecycle management best practices

Follow these asset management best practices to reduce maintenance costs, boost efficiency, and stay productive.

• Prepare an asset inventory along with a system map.
• Build an asset condition rating system for asset rating.
• Use decay curves to assess the remaining useful life of assets.
• Find out asset values and replacement costs.
• Analyze customer demand and satisfaction with systems.
• Set and communicate asset performance targets with stakeholders.
• List assets based on their importance to operations.
• Determine the probability of failure with root cause and failure mode analysis.
• Review and update system vulnerability policies and measures.
• Be proactive in adopting predictive maintenance.
• Evaluate rehabilitation vs. replacement cost of critical assets.
• Deploy assets based on requirements.
• Analyze asset failure causes to create response plans.
• Create an asset annuity to fund asset repair, replacement, and rehabilitation.

From spreadsheet chaos to streamlined operations: A global conglomerate's CMMS success

Imagine managing a real estate empire spanning multiple industries and countries. Now picture juggling spreadsheets and siloed data systems to keep track of thousands of assets, tenants, and vendors.

That was the reality for a leading UAE conglomerate, Al Tayer, before they discovered the power of CMMS.

Here's the struggle they faced:

• Drowning in data silos: Fragmented information across spreadsheets, emails, and various software made it impossible to get a holistic view of operations.
• Manual mayhem: Repetitive tasks like work order approvals and data entry slowed everything down.
• Vendor reliance: They lacked in-house reporting capabilities, making them dependent on vendors for insights.

The result? Frustration, inefficiency, and a struggle to maintain tenant satisfaction.

Enter Facilio’s connected CMMS: A centralized command center

Here's how Facilio transformed their operations:

• Single source of truth: A unified platform brought all asset data, tenant requests, and vendor information together.
• Automated workflows: Say goodbye to manual approvals! Automated processes streamlined everything from work order generation to vendor assignment.
• Real-time reporting: In-house reporting capabilities provided instant visibility into performance metrics, empowering them to make data-driven decisions.

The Impact: Beyond spreadsheets

This isn't just about efficiency gains. Here's how this UAE conglomerate truly thrived after implementing CMMS:

• Empowered FM teams: Reduced manual tasks freed up time for FM teams to focus on resolving tenant concerns, and fostering better tenant relationships.
• Improved decision-making: Data-driven insights allowed them to optimize operations, reduce costs, and ensure vendor compliance.
• Enhanced tenant experience: Self-service features and real-time updates kept tenants informed and in control of their service requests.

This case study proves that CMMS isn't just a software solution – it's a strategic investment that can transform your asset management game.

Asset lifecycle management with Facilio

Facilio offers a comprehensive CMMS platform that empowers businesses to implement a data-driven approach to asset lifecycle management. It goes beyond traditional asset management software in several key ways:

• Focus on end-to-end lifecycle management: Facilio encompasses the entire asset lifecycle, from acquisition and onboarding to disposal or refurbishment. This holistic approach ensures all aspects of asset management are considered for optimal performance and value.
• Cloud-based and mobile-friendly: Facilio's cloud-based platform enables secure access to asset information and management tools from anywhere, anytime, on any device. This empowers real-time decision-making and facilitates collaboration across teams.

How does Facilio go beyond legacy asset management software?

Legacy CMMS lack the capabilities to effectively manage complex asset portfolios in today's dynamic business landscape. Facilio addresses these limitations by offering:

• IoT integration: Facilio integrates with condition-based sensors to collect real-time data on asset health and performance. This data provides valuable insights that enable proactive maintenance and informed decision-making.
  
• Advanced analytics: Facilio utilizes advanced analytics to transform raw data into actionable insights. Predictive maintenance capabilities help identify potential issues before they escalate, preventing costly breakdowns and downtime.

Facilio key features

Key features of Facilio's CMMS platform that contribute to improved asset performance and lifespan:

• Asset visualization: Gain a clear view of your entire asset portfolio through an interactive dashboard. Monitor asset readings based on various parameters, including static data and dynamic performance metrics, allowing for comprehensive asset health monitoring.
• Performance optimization: Facilio leverages real-time IoT-driven insights to provide a holistic understanding of asset health and energy consumption. This empowers data-driven decisions to optimize asset performance and maximize efficiency.
• Renewals, audit, and compliance: Automate tasks like audit approvals and compliance work orders to ensure timely replacements and renewals, minimizing the risk of non-compliance issues. This streamlines processes and reduces administrative burdens.
• Connected CMMS: Facilio fosters a connected ecosystem by integrating with various building automation systems and facility management tools. This centralized platform provides a unified view of your assets and operations for better decision-making.
• Conditional alarms and fault detection: Move beyond reactive maintenance. Facilio's system generates conditional alarms based on pre-defined parameters, allowing for early detection of potential problems. This enables proactive intervention and minimizes the risk of major failures.
• Root cause analysis: Facilio empowers you to identify the root cause of asset issues, allowing you to address underlying problems and prevent them from recurring. This proactive approach contributes to improved asset reliability and performance.

Industries that can utilize asset management software

The benefits of Facilio's asset management software extend to a wide range of industries, including:

• Healthcare: Optimize the performance of critical medical equipment, ensuring patient safety and operational efficiency.
• Automotive: Manage fleets of vehicles, optimize maintenance schedules, and extend the lifespan of transportation assets.
• Construction: Track and maintain heavy machinery, tools, and equipment used at construction sites, ensuring project completion on time and within budget.
• Manufacturing: Maintain production lines, optimize equipment performance, and minimize downtime to maximize production output.
• Rental Services: Ensure the proper maintenance and functionality of rental equipment to provide a reliable experience for customers.
• Property and facilities management: Effectively manage buildings, infrastructure, and other fixed assets to maintain optimal functionality and value.
• IT and telecommunications: Track and maintain servers, network equipment, and other critical IT infrastructure for smooth operation and uninterrupted service delivery.

Get a 360° view of your assets portfolio

The lack of the right software often creates information silos for businesses with heterogeneous assets. This silo mentality stops you from accurately understanding how assets are performing, what needs replacement, and when.

Plus, you suffer from regulatory pressures around safety, security, and sustainability. Your operational expenditure (OPEX) and capital expenditure (CAPEX) skyrocket before you know it.

An enterprise property and maintenance operations platform like Facilio empowers you to break free from information silos. Facilio's CMMS goes beyond asset management, offering a comprehensive solution for the entire asset lifecycle.

From performance optimization and fault detection to simplified compliance, automated work orders, and managing rental & warranty contracts within the platform. This holistic approach provides the key to visualizing your asset portfolio, keep CAPEX under control and boost asset productivity.

FAQs

What is an asset lifecycle?

An asset lifecycle refers to the series of stages an asset goes through during its lifetime. An asset starts its lifecycle with planning and remains a part of it till disposal. Asset lifecycle management helps businesses track asset replacement and ensure asset reliability.

What is asset lifecycle management?

Asset lifecycle management involves tracking and optimizing the performance and reliability of assets from acquisition to disposal, ensuring they remain useful and cost-effective throughout their lifespan.

Why is asset lifecycle management important?

Asset lifecycle management minimizes downtime, reduces maintenance costs, and ensures compliance with regulatory standards by providing a structured approach to maintaining and managing assets.

What are the stages of asset lifecycle management?

The stages include planning, acquisition, operation & maintenance, and disposal. Each stage focuses on different activities to maintain and optimize asset performance.

How can technology improve asset lifecycle management?

Technology can improve asset lifecycle management by providing real-time monitoring and data-driven insights into asset performance, enabling predictive maintenance to prevent costly downtime and repairs. Additionally, automation streamlines processes, reducing human error and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.