Get high asset ROI via IBM industry service management

Good asset management leads to a cost-optimized outcome

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. In the pursuit of a smarter planet—one empowered by organizations that make optimized use of resources for the benefit of themselves, their customers, their business partners and the world as a whole—asset management is a natural focus. Asset management can help render infrastructures more dynamic, more responsive, more effective and more cost-effective—all primary goals going forward.

What does this involve? Deployed assets must be carefully tracked and monitored to ensure that they are delivering maximum business value at every stage in their lifecycles. Yet the diversity and complexity of such assets—for instance, the wide range of assets in place in a telecommunications provider's infrastructure—can make that a difficult goal to achieve.

Organizations that do achieve it, however, will be rewarded by an abundance of business benefits. Through smarter asset management solutions and strategies, organizations obtain key information necessary to maximize asset performance—whether those assets are on or off the IP infrastructure—as well as attend to a wide variety of other business-beneficial tasks such as tracking asset costs, creating more accurate cost projections, increasing asset utilization, connecting operational domains where that makes good business sense and, in a longer term, suggesting new ways that assets can be leveraged to better satisfy customer demand.

Asset management is a central aspect of service management

“What organizations in different industries actually require are unique service management implementations designed to map to their industry-specific goals, challenges and assets—incorporating, where appropriate, different forms of asset management as part of the overall service management strategy.” The relationship between asset management and service management is also a natural, logical one. Effective, holistic asset management can, by helping the organization monitor and orchestrate the elements responsible for its key services, empower and drive superior service management. When assets are best tuned for performance and uptime, the services they support will more precisely meet customer needs.

Of course, those assets will differ considerably across organizations, and even more so across industries. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that both the assets and the services involved in, for instance, the petroleum and gas industry differ substantially from those in the telecommunications industry. Other industries are similarly diverse in nature and needs.

For these reasons, service management per se is perhaps too broad a term to apply in this context. What organizations in different industries actually require are unique service management implementations designed to map to their industry-specific goals, challenges and assets—incorporating, where appropriate, different forms of asset management as part of the overall service management strategy.

IBM now offers industry-specific service management packages with asset management solutions

At Pulse 2009 in February of this year, IBM unveiled seven different industry-specific service management packages of exactly this type.

Each package helps to fulfill IBM's larger vision of the dynamic infrastructure. This is an evolutionary approach by which organizations can migrate their infrastructures to more quickly adapt to, and even benefit from, a rapidly-changing business climate by delivering services faster, with higher availability and more flexibility to adjust to changing conditions and customer demand levels. And six of these service management packages also provide dedicated asset management components targeting the assets unique to their industries, thus helping to spur superior service management over time.

Energy and Utilities

Here, asset management is directly on point to help get best business value from new asset classes—and improve the return on investment for older ones. Smart electrical grids, for instance, which going forward will increasingly resemble IP networks, require end-to-end asset management in order to improve the intelligence they generate and the services they deliver end users. Smart meters, too, represent a new form of asset that must be managed effectively to deliver on the target value proposition.

Among other offerings in the IBM Service Management package for Energy and Utilities: IBM Maximo for Utilities, which serves as a powerful platform to leverage all pertinent asset classes through comprehensive tracking, monitoring, health and status levels and even geospatial mapping determining through Maximo Spatial technology.

Chemicals and Petroleum

This industry serves as an excellent example of how assets vary across business sectors—and require special asset management solutions designed to address specific complexities. In the chemicals and petroleum sector, assets will commonly include such elements as pipelines, plants and rigs; obtaining end-to-end visibility of the status of such assets, including service histories, measurements and calibrations and real-time data on performance, is far from easy.

The IBM Service Management package for this industry, which includes IBM Maximo for Oil and Gas, fortunately addresses just these concerns. Entire oil field metrics can be viewed in a graphic interface, with greater detail for any given asset available on demand. Key data and processes can be monitored in both business and technological contexts. And automation, through predefined events, helps to increase asset lifetime via a rapid and effective response when one is required by unexpected or emergency conditions.

Communications Service Providers

In this sector, good service management is essential to ensure that the customer experience is satisfactory and customer churn is minimized. Yet because service providers have such a broad range of solutions, applied to such an enormous and complex infrastructure, assuring that end-to-end performance levels continually stay within an acceptable range is quite a tricky proposition.

Directly on point is the IBM Service Management for Communications Service Providers package, which includes elements from the IBM Tivoli Netcool family of solutions designed to help providers get the best possible return on all deployed assets—however complex those assets may be. Thanks to a bird's eye view of the entire telecommunications infrastructure, which managers can then drill into at any necessary depth to isolate and escalate problems, this package helps give service providers the information they need to verify that assets (and the services they support) are up and running—or if not, to take action required to minimize the business impact, sometimes before customers even notice a problem.

Electronics

The need to deliver higher-quality offerings, in shorter periods of time, has led to an asset management challenge in the electronics industry. As the product development lifecycle has become more complex, integrating different solutions and business processes to achieve superior business value—swiftly and efficiently—has become more and more difficult to accomplish.

Fortunately, the IBM Service Management for Electronics package was designed with these issues in mind. It helps track, monitor and manage all critical assets, including IT, to improve overall reliability, availability and performance. This is directly applicable in the case of product lifecycle management (PLM) architectures—for instance, in order to ensure that assets such as PLM-centric systems, servers and SOA services remain fully capable of translating business goals into developmental efficiencies and deliverable offerings.

Product Lifecycle Management (Manufacturing)

This industry is challenged in many dimensions. Just as revenues are threatened, for instance, operational expenses and process complexity are climbing, and supply-chain interdependencies are becoming more complex as well—making it harder and harder to manufacture on time, within budget and up to specification.

IBM Service Management for Product Lifecycle Management can help. This package, comprised of various elements of the best-in-class IBM Tivoli system management suite, simplifies the difficult task of distinguishing which assets are in use at which times, by whom and for which purposes. It also helps organizations to comprehensively monitor those assets for key events likely to generate a significant business impact, as well as secure them from malicious or fraudulent use—even from trusted insiders with extra access privileges.

Retail

Finally, retail is an industry which has been exceptionally challenged by the economic downturn. To respond to such a difficult business climate, retail organizations must strive to deploy new strategies and customer-centric offerings with exceptional speed and flexibility. And toward that end, the uptime, performance and utilization of assets can play a critical role in the success of the overall strategy.

For this reason, IBM Service Management for Retail includes comprehensive monitoring and securing of all retail-relevant assets—at every stage in their lifecycles—helping to ensure that they are protected from damage, loss, theft and fraud. Assets in production, facilities, transportation and IT are all addressed via built-in IBM Tivoli components.

Learn more

Contact IBM

Considering a purchase?

Or call us at:
877-426-3774
Priority code:
109HJ03W

White paper

Enabling Business Transformation through IBM Service Management

Featured community

Leverage and contribute to the collective wisdom around Tivoli

Engage the community