Put data and AI to work across your enterprise operations.

Today’s technology infrastructures weren’t designed for cross-organizational efficiency. Because of this issue, most organizations struggle with how to maximize their critical assets’ value throughout their lifecycle. But you can only manage what you can measure—and that means data is now the single most important resource available to you. With profitability, efficiency and customer loyalty at stake, as well as environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals to be met, data can make or break your competitive advantage.

No matter what sector your operations serve, whether it’s automotive, medical facilities (2:30), civil infrastructure (02:29) or other industries, the core challenge is the same: you need to monitor and measure how asset performance affects business before defects and anomalies cause problems, and manage responses accordingly. And the only way to determine asset performance is to have a clear view of the data it generates.

With data confined in silos and complex systems running critical infrastructures, it’s no surprise that while the volume of data has never been greater, the value of data hasn’t been maximized.

Every aspect of your operations, including all your critical assets and resources, has the potential to be connected, monitored, managed and optimized using technology. And with the pressing focus on running a sustainable business, the ability to confidently capture, document, manage and disclose ESG data to stakeholders must come within reach quickly.

That’s where intelligent asset management (IAM) comes in. IAM puts data and AI to work to optimize critical asset performance and automate enterprise operations. By harnessing the power of data and AI, you can more easily monitor, predict and increase asset reliability through self-optimizing operations.

Plus, successful ESG goals rely on disciplined data management. This process, in turn, requires a single system of record management.

It all sets the foundation for applying actionable insights so that you can increase efficiency, extend asset lifecycles, and reduce downtime and costs—all while building resiliency and sustainability into your business.

IAM provides the foundation for you to measure, manage, monitor and maintain your assets and operational strategy. It can apply to physical assets, facilities, people and products. IAM becomes your platform for optimal collaboration, integration and analytical insights.

Build sustainability and resiliency into your business

Traditionally, unlocking the answers you needed to build agility and resiliency throughout your business required access to mountains of disparate data, along with the technology and acumen to extract actionable insights.

But with an IAM approach, you can tame the chaos by providing your team access to data, workflows and insights that they can use to make smarter decisions with the help of AI.

According to the new CIO study¹ from IBM, plans are in place for more data-intensive investments over the next three years like AI, IoT, edge and automation. This data is needed for insights to transform business, but with such a large volume of data, these insights often remain hidden. Decoding data is paramount.

If you don’t have a system established to capitalize on operational data, you’ll find that maintenance operations are inefficient and production processes are poor.

Instead of being focused on stabilizing operational downtime and defects, you can use IAM to get the data that will help you determine the root causes.

This method will turn your operations from a reactive, break/fix model into a proactive predict, address and avoid downtime model.

And with that level of control, you’ll save time, cut costs and optimize performance.

Intelligent asset management works by bringing together the data that’s generated by your assets with the control systems and sensors within your operating environment.

Together, it provides you with the ability to monitor and measure your operations.

Enterprises need a 360-degree operational view, 365 days a year. To help better monitor and measure operations, IAM consolidates internal and external data, combining it with real-time control system, weather and sensor data to deliver predictive operating awareness.

It allows you to optimize asset monitoring and measurement strategies with AI-powered remote asset monitoring to spot data anomalies and ensure a focus on meaningful alerts and triggers, including cues that are imperceptible to operators. It can help you steer clear of downtime by applying predictive maintenance diagnostics—like asset criticality—to these data streams to help optimize maintenance budgets with the right response at the right time.

With intelligent asset management, you focus on optimizing and prioritizing activities, resources, schedules and skills.

IAM provides the foundation to extend asset lifespans, drive productivity, monitor asset performance and reduce unplanned downtime, even in the most complicated and demanding environments. To achieve that goal, you need to consolidate your data, streamline reporting, identify efficiency opportunities and discover where to focus your investments.

Use next-generation technologies to optimize products and services, increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs.

Operations run in tightly controlled environments designed to maximize efficiencies. When a defect happens in a product or service, it’s not always easy to catch the problem before it moves onto the next process, or a defective part means you’ve lost a customer.

With an IAM system, you can rely on the combined benefits of vision inspection and AI to identify anomalies during production processes. These capabilities allow you to act immediately on any variance so that the product doesn’t continue along the production line or an improperly installed part causes wider problems.

Identifying and averting problem products can:

• Increase customer satisfaction by avoiding imperfect products from entering the market.
• Limit downtime by alerting technicians to divert failed items out of the production line to avoid rework.
• Save time and money by identifying which systems are causing problematic errors.
• Enhance customer and employee engagement to drive productivity.

In some cases, IAM has saved millions of dollars over the course of a year.

Using an integrated system of IAM, all the assets in your organization can be monitored continuously within a single system. The system can identify a problem with one of the assets and send a service request to a service analyst. With a single click, the service analyst can drill down to into the details, see that the issue requires an onsite inspection of the asset and quickly create a work order to dispatch a trained technician.

The technician can use a mobile device to review the work order, asset history, plan for remediation, and technical documentation before getting to work on the problem.

Descriptive AI assistance can analyze thousands of documents to deploy the fix with the highest success probability. And if more advanced technical help is needed, a video of the problem can be shot and sent to the next service-level technician who can review and recommend a fix.

All these actions are recorded in the asset’s maintenance history, providing a complete repair record to refer to for the next incident. This data can be used by other technicians and AI systems that gather performance data.

With this level of asset monitoring, IAM can decrease administrative costs, improve service and offer greater visibility into asset utilization, costs and maintenance.

Organizations face climate-related damage to their assets, disruptions to supply chains and operations, and expectations to perform as an environmental steward of the resources they manage.

Extreme weather, climate action failure and human-led environmental damage were cited as the top three most likely risks for businesses over the next ten years in the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2021.”²

But it’s not easy to access actionable environmental insights. It’s often cumbersome and complex—requiring intensive manual labor, climate and data science skills, and computing power.

The IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite is an AI-powered SaaS solution that provides organizations with timely and fact-based actionable intelligence to proactively plan and manage the economic impact of severe weather and climate change events; built on the world’s most accurate weather data.

• Monitor for disruptive environmental conditions, such as severe weather, wildfires, flooding and air quality, and send alerts when detected.
• Predict potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business using climate risk analytics.
• Gain insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritize mitigation and response efforts.

By empowering IAM with climate, weather and environmental insights, you can help streamline and automate the management of environmental risks and operationalize underlying processes, including carbon accounting and reduction. This helps to reduce environmental impact and achieve operational resiliency in the face of climate change.

Financial-grade ESG reporting

Organizations are recognizing the value of operating in a more sustainable and socially responsible manner. However, even as they work to deliver on sustainability commitments, they face mounting pressure from regulators, investors and consumers to demonstrate progress in a verifiable way. Building a sustainable business and ensuring proper management of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators have never been more important or challenging.

With leading IAM systems designed specifically for ESG reporting, such as IBM^® Envizi Sustainability Performance Management, you can automate the collection and consolidation of more than 500 data types and find support for major, internationally recognized ESG reporting frameworks. With powerful visualizations and easily customizable dashboards, it enables you to manage environmental goals, identify efficiency opportunities and assess sustainability risks.

The IBM Envizi Sustainability Performance Management can help you:

• Get a single system of record that delivers auditable, finance-grade ESG and sustainability data.
• Streamline ESG reporting to meet internal and external ESG and sustainability reporting requirements.
• Integrate internal and external stakeholders, process and technology to embed sustainability into daily operations.
• Unlock insights to inform the fastest and most cost-effective pathway to decarbonization.

With over a decade of Gartner Magic Quadrant leadership, IBM^® Maximo^® software provides one of the most trusted enterprise asset management solutions on the planet. Using weather and geospatial data from the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, along with the IBM^® TRIRIGA^® integrated workplace management system (IWMA), IBM has the capabilities you need to deliver the sustainable operations required for today’s market leadership. With an open platform and an extensive partner ecosystem across industries, IBM puts data and AI to work for you.