Manufacture More Business Value with IBM Maximo

Confronting the complexities of asset management in manufacturing

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Manufacturers today face many formidable challenges. Toward addressing them, one powerful strategy lies in optimizing asset management.

Why should this be the case? Business success is closely intertwined with return on investment, and manufacturers therefore strive to obtain the best possible return on investment from the full range of their assets—both IT and traditional—across all phases of these assets' lifecycles. Standing in the way of that goal, however, are numerous obstacles. For instance, manufacturing assets are often managed in a rigid, siloed fashion, based on technological or business groups; this makes it significantly harder to leverage them across those silos, despite the fact that cross-silo services might be essential in the fulfillment of new goals or strategies.

Globalization, too, adds complexity for manufacturers by distributing assets geographically and multiplying management requirements. Often, one-off applications may address today's problems, yet create tomorrow's, as a result of the added difficulty integrating them and their disparate data pools into bigger-picture asset management strategies.

Manufacturers also face a special challenge in integrating and leveraging different types of business information, which should be comprehensively captured, analyzed and displayed in a manner that best suits business users, with respect to their needs and contexts. In particular, these challenges may apply to information coming from customers. Such information can play a critical role in revising and enhancing offerings to align with customer interest—the essential goal of good service management—yet all too often, there is no direct link between customer feedback and asset management for manufacturers today.

The outcome? Reduced responsiveness to customer needs and interests, reduced market share, reduced revenues—in short, a diminished business bottom line, in which assets fail to generate optimal value over time.

IBM Maximo delivers superior asset management across the full asset lifecycle

An improved outcome would require a unified and integrated information framework approach designed to optimize asset management (and asset related services) through a holistic solution addressing and capturing data from different information resources to provide the necessary information to enhance decision making processes around all critical assets.

The IBM Maximo Asset Management family can be used to manage and optimize just such an integrated information framework approach.
How does it accomplish this? Essentially, IBM Maximo solutions work by way of a centralized data repository that spans all assets and services, regardless of how they may be deployed or managed in an organization at present. Asset management functions are then fulfilled via a unified business process engine, addressing such diverse areas as asset discovery, inventory, health/status tracking, procurement, contracts, service level agreements and others.

Ongoing performance of assets is measured and monitored, on the basis of key performance indicators, in real-time reports, which both inform and help improve overall asset and service management. And because of the holistic nature and capabilities of the Maximo solution, it also represents an excellent platform for manufacturers to use in combination of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), by which these specific services can be combined, optimized, and scaled to suit dynamic demand and invoked by any requesting entity—sparing the organization the costs of reinventing the wheel every time new demand is required as part of new business processes.

Building and leveraging integrated information

For manufacturers in particular, one way to understand the appeal of the Maximo platform is to see how it facilitates an integrated information framework approach—and how that approach can in turn optimize the overall asset management and service management strategies over time.

An information framework is not a data model or definition of application implementation. It is, more abstractly, a means of establishing and connecting different kinds of information pertaining to services and assets (such as relationships between assets or equipment, measurements, equipment status reports, unit operations and more) and then taking prioritized action on the basis of that information to create more business value from assets.

In this way, it will be possible to:

Preserve existing application and system investments (not rip and replace with new ones)
Leverage common process models across applications for improved consistency and performance
Build new coarse- and fine-grained service definitions for information access
Implement a practical SOA to increase service scalability and reduce costs
Pursue PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), to digitize the entire product lifecycle, from creation to retirement/disposal
Implement lean manufacturing strategies as well, to reduce inefficiency/waste wherever possible through a tight focus on business/customer value

Another key benefit: assets are managed at an appropriate level given their business context, rather than receiving too few resources (or too many). Return on Assets is maximized, because assets are now maintained at a level which balances the maintenance costs they generate with the service levels they should deliver.

Thanks to the fact that it can track both IT and non-IT assets, IBM Maximo empowers organizations to monitor all assets, then capitalize on the monitoring data in many ways. These include analyzing data, to establish and proactively address business risks; measuring the rate of change and identifying impending trends; managing asset complexity and measurement data; and managing asset configuration rules, particularly to improve safety and achieve regulation compliance.

Generating new revenues by enhancing old business relationships

Integrating information including data from Maximo Asset Management also helps manufacturers turn asset management into a revenue generator in its own right. It can manage and improve aftermarket services that can in return develop existing customer relationships in new ways.

Specifically, it helps manufacturers establish the asset catalog at customer sites, detect any variances that may threaten service consistency and customer satisfaction, determine how to meet the terms of Service Level Agreements (SLAs), verify that work for customers is actually under contract in the first place (a surprisingly common problem), and in many other ways.

Also important in this context: such optimized aftermarket services can help resolve the key problem of linking customer feedback/requests with asset management. These services spur information flow from customers, and thus help manufacturers determine how customers actually install and maintain their products in the field, turning customers into collaborators whose contributions lead over time to better quality products, higher customer retention rates and a superior business bottom line result for manufacturers.

Leveraging IBM Maximo Asset Management to drive business growth in manufacturing

Given these many compelling possibilities-all supported by an integrated solution and orchestrated by the IBM Maximo Asset Management application suite of solutions, one can expect IBM Maximo to deliver impressive business value for real-world manufacturers around the world.

Consider the recent success of a major aerospace/defense manufacturer, for instance. This organization uses IBM Maximo to gather data pertaining to customer relationships, then refine and extend those relationships correspondingly via establishing, prioritizing and helping to fulfill all the many commitments involved in overall service delivery. By shifting the focus from domain-specific technologies to the services those technologies support, and optimizing the services to better address customer needs, this company has realized tremendous business benefits—to wit, a remarkable 40 percent increase in service-generated revenues.

Similar optimization has been achieved by a large rail car manufacturer. This organization has leveraged IBM Maximo to generate remarkable business value, thanks to its holistic support for all assets, at all stages in their lifecycles. The result is that the organization has been able to refine and scale its comprehensive range of railroad products and services in proportion to customer demand, even though that demand fluctuates and changes in nature over time, creating thirty percent overall growth.