Enterprise Asset Management: Highlights from Mainstream 2021

Last year I reported on Mastering EAM, which for the Australia New Zealand Enterprise Asset Management community, was the first conference to be run completely virtually with sponsors and attendees utilizing new networking techniques and tools from their home or office.  Despite my reservations, it was for the most part a success for Rizing as a Partner.  This year at Mainstream was no different, again a one hundred percent virtual conference and another success.

As an advocate for traditional in-person conferences, I still believe you cannot replace the face to face networking and the chance to meet with potential customers and partners.  However, the virtual booth, with the addition of the networking hub that acts as a virtual social gathering place, resulted in an interesting experience once again.

EAM Human Factors and Women in the Workforce

As for the conference content, there was a great lineup of local and international presenters who spoke on a range of topics; from stress and fatigue management to Big Data and Maximising Asset Reliability with Human Factors. We were provided the advantage of gaining real insight into the state of local industries and the factors concerning them. For example, Bonita Carroll, Doctoral Researcher, University of Western Australia & Matthew Brierley, Manager – Intelligent Assets, Woodside Energy Limited hosted a great session on “The Business of Becoming a Female Maintainer.” They illuminated that Tradespeople comprise 15 percent of the Western Australian resources sector workforce, but of that 15 percent, women only make up three percent. It was interesting to note that the private sector, specifically Monadelphous and BHP, have joined forces to promote change through Bonita Carroll’s research into the impediments of attracting and retaining women in trade roles.

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Tradespeople comprise 15 percent of the Western Australian resources sector workforce, but of that 15 percent, women only make up three percent.

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The work takes an in-depth look at the conundrum surrounding women’s enduring low representation in manual trades. Although the impetus of the work was to understand the working life of a female maintainer, what emerged is a rich understanding of the lived experiences of both male and female maintainers and the impact of gendered practices on social change in many facets of modern life.

Real-time interaction with Mainstream conference participants

Rizing partnered with SAP to present a number of topics focusing on Enterprise Asset Management.  Interestingly, with the presentations being virtual, we were able to utilize a poll portal called Mentimeter.  This is an app where questions can be asked on screen and attendees would navigate to the portal via the app and provide answers to the questions which are updated and displayed in real-time.  Using the app provided some real-time insight into what the audience was thinking or what their organizations were doing and enabled the presenters to respond based on the audience’s answers.

For example, Jonathan Marvin of Rizing, Jon Wilson and Simon Lee of SAP presented “Asset Management in the Age of Industry 4.0”.  When the question “What does Industry 4.0 mean to you” was presented, there were some interesting answers, from direct to humorous. One response was IOT, Digital Transformation, and Information revolution.  On the more interesting side was “Jargon”, “Marketing term to sell something IT has been doing for years” and finally “More work for IT”.

On a serious note, when asked to rank the style of maintenance in order of most common to least common the following results were attained:

So, whilst Condition-based maintenance and Predictive maintenance have been a hot topic for many years, (and IT has been doing it for years) the majority of enterprise asset maintenance is done in a traditional manner.  This raises a question in my mind, why?

To gain more insight on this you would have to have seen the roundtable with Martin Greaves of Rizing and Jon Wilson of SAP, again (he was really busy) titled “Asset Management in the Land of Oz: Looking Behind the Curtain”.  This was a collaborative session to understand the state of play across Australia’s asset-intensive industries, exploring strategies and methodologies that have been adopted, and how successful they have been. In this session we learned that most of the attendees perform “planned or preventive maintenance”, and secondly, “reactive maintenance.”  Further behind was “increasingly condition-based maintenance” and no one made use of “predictive maintenance tools”.

What prevents companies from achieving enterprise asset data maturity?

So, what are some of the issues preventing companies from attaining higher maturity?  Here are some highlights which were the answers provided to that very question:

• Time and resources was #1
• Lack of Management Support was #2

In conclusion, I agree, IT may have been doing this for years, but the lack of adoption is due, it seems, to lack of time and people availability to plan and execute the implementation of new strategies and the support of management to invest.

Here at Rizing we have specialists with a great deal of experience in the deployment of solutions to enable improvements in Asset Management maturity.  We are also able to support your endeavor to build a compelling business case to garner the support of management to invest in these key projects.  If you are part of an organization that aspires to achieve greater maturity but is unable to get the project off the ground, we would love to talk to you.

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About the author:

Hedley Norrish is the Director, Business Development, ANZ at Rizing EAM. With recognized ERP and EAM expertise in oil and gas, utilities and mining, he is been attending Mainstream run by Eventful for 13 years.