A while back, Nick from the ProSoft blog posted a comment asking about Asset Management.   At the time I was thinking it would make a good topic for a posting, but never did get around to putting one together.   Nick had another recent post talking about Asset Management which brought the topic back to mind.   Actually, the topic has been floating around in the news for the last couple of weeks about the Invensys and Emerson solutions.  Walt Boyes had an article on it too, not that long ago.  Of all the chatter about asset management, there’s a paragraph from Walt’s piece that really stood out.

“But the biggest bang for the buck, beyond doubt, is enterprise asset management, from the plant floor level all the way up to the conception of each plant itself as an asset to be managed. If you can implement it properly, enterprise asset management can put the spring back in your plant’s step, add years to its life and probably keep you going for a while longer too.”

What is an asset, and what management is needed?  The term asset management covers a lot of ground (quite literally in some plants).  One definition would be the control and operation of all physical and soft assets within an organization. Often asset management refers to the maintenance of physical pieces of equipment, or how it relates with the Condition-Based Maintenance philosophy.  At the enterprise level, the term also covers the maintenance of soft assets, such as software and control systems.  Regardless of what assets you include in the umbrella, you need to get the data from the floor in near-real time in order to make effective and timely decisions.  OPC is all about getting data to where you need it to be.

OPC can be used to feed process information to the CMMS system, capture process data in a historian for condition based maintenance analysis, IT Health monitoring, etc.  There are OPC servers available today that can collect data from field devices, control systems, IT hardware, and many other common assets.  Along the ‘biggest bang’ thinking OPC UA is promising to be the standardized conduit for tying the enterprise together.  OPC UA is looking to standardize interfacing into the applications higher in the enterprise.  In addition the working group is collaborating with organizations such as EDDL and the FDT Group to be the mechanism for communicating between the various systems.

It all boils down to getting the right data to the right systems at the right time to make the right decisions.   Regardless of the assets.