The latest APM Market Guide from Gartner provides some welcome clarity to the current status of APM concepts and maturity, and also outlines some key cautions.
Firstly, Gartner reinforces the value APM provides, stating “APM is a system of innovation that adds capability for effective and efficient asset maintenance decision support,” which of course is what drives organizations to pursue the approach and accompanying technology.
The subtlety here is the reinforcement that APM is essentially a decision support process. To be successful, it must support not only a transaction process of work execution but also support strategic asset maintenance decision making.
Prior to any pursuit of APM, Gartner recommends every organization “assess the organizations asset management capabilities by working with business and IT leads to ensure the requisite level of people/skills, processes and systems data are in place before investing in APM.” Given the connectivity of APM to other business systems and processes and specifically the work management process, we could not agree more with the approach to “ensure that APM insights can be acted on by evaluating the footprint and maturity of your EAM system.”
It is perhaps a surprising reality that in many cases, even organizations with the most mature asset management approaches have varying levels of confidence in the data inside their EAM system:
- Are all our assets covered?
- Do we understand what they are?
- Do we understand the components on those assets?
- Do we have the relevant materials and BoMs set up
- Are we capturing the relevant work execution feedback to allow us to improve
- What is the basis and justification for our current work plans?
It is Gartner’s opinion that “Organization’s have limited availability of good quality and consistent asset data to support a more advanced maintenance strategy.”
How organizations can successfully step into an APM initiative and set the foundation for more advanced maintenance strategy, therefore, should be the first consideration. This does not just mean a work management master data project, since experience tells us that these projects in isolation add little value to operations.
How can data be completed, structures be improved and a foundation be laid for APM?
The full Gartner report is a worthwhile read and a great starting point for any organization looking to embark on or perhaps reimplement an APM program.
