Part II: TOP 3 Tech rends To Exceed Traditional Asset Management

What are the other leading digital solutions for Enterprise Asset Management that will be trending in 2023?

In the first article in the series dedicated to the emerging trends in enterprise asset management for this year, we told about three exciting technologies that are (already) changing the landscape across industries:

Digital Inspections
Remote Work
Cloud-Based Enterprise Asset Management

These are a small part of the instrumentation of the Effective Asset Manager.

In the second article of the series ‘Top Trends in Asset Management to Boost Your Competitiveness’ we will introduce you to 3 other tools that will keep you on the Edge of your seat.

Immersive technologies are connecting physical and digital

Immersive technology is the integration of virtual content with the physical environment in a way that allows the user to naturally engage with mixed reality. In an immersive experience, the boundaries between physical and virtual blur.

Immersive technologies include:

Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR)
Mixed Reality (MR)
Holography
Telepresence
Digital Twin
FPV drone flight

In asset management, immersive technology facilitates remote inspection of equipment. This enables maintenance managers to determine the type and location of the failure, saves them time from on-site inspection and lowers the risk of work accidents. Furthermore, this enables remote technical assistance. Experts help troubleshoot production, construction, or safety issues in real-time. McLaren and Siemens are leading companies that utilize this approach to make their design and operations teams more efficient.

In industries such as Aerospace immersive technology finds application in R&D activity, where engineers minimize assemblage concerns with the use of 3D modelling and verification of specifications in a contained environment. Virtual Reality (VR) has also been applied to provide new trainees and experienced employees with the opportunity to experience real-life operations without putting them at risk. Practice in simulated conditions increases their confidence and can be perceived as a preventive approach for health-related risks.

Similarly, in the construction industry architects use VR to replicate intuitively the experience of a building design serving as a presentation and PoC for all stakeholders. On the other hand, Augmented Reality (AR) is finding a role in construction as it allows to map the digital construction and superimpose it onto the physical world.

To summarize, immersive technology across industries allows professionals to:

Introduce customers and stakeholders with virtual walkthroughs and simulations of real-life conditions
Simulate changes they would want to implement and reflect on the results
Pursue improvements that boost functionality, performance, and safety
Collaborate with stakeholders to detect defaults and adopt a preventive approach to deliver the project on budget
Speed up the design and construction processes
Reduce required time resources

The feedback from some enterprise VR programs shows that they improve productivity by an average of 32% while employees share that Augmented Reality helps them improve their problem-solving and they perceive it as more efficient than a standard video call.

Edge technologies are bringing us closer to the data sources

The edge is a distributed framework where the computing infrastructure is as close as possible to the source of data and the processing happens as close to the originating data source as possible.

When it comes to enterprise asset management, the foundation for this infrastructure is the assets themselves. Each of them is characterized by specific activities that it performs and parameters about the status of which the organization wants to receive information. This monitoring (in real time) is done through smart sensors attached to the assets. Sensor data is a prerequisite for automation in asset maintenance practices. But for time series analysis to be possible to understand the collected data, it needs to be processed first. All sensors connected to the assets are connected to a communication network over which the data is transmitted to a place where it can be processed and analysed. This is how edge computing is implemented.

This is how data processing is generally carried out in the predictive maintenance plan. Smart devices that collect data in real time, collect this historical data and often send it raw to a cloud service to get processed and analysed. With Edge technology this raw sensor-data stays closer to the device to get processed locally.

Usually enterprises want to enable indoor and outdoor asset tracking. Depending on the circumstances, GNSS-only devices may fail and this is where edge devices вземат превес, поддържайки multiple location technologies – GNSS, Wi-Fi AP MAC Address Scanning, and Cell Tower location, LoRaWAN®.

Edge devices can reduce power consumption being over 5-10 times more power efficient than more on-device GNSS solutions by determining asset location on the cloud.

Moving a big part of the data processing to the edge reduces latency, cuts the costs for bandwidth and data transmission and improves security as the raw data is processed locally, close to the assets.

Applications of edge technology that have the potential to deliver the greatest ROI across industries include:

Environment monitoring for equipment
Base station remote monitoring and management
Inventory control
Capacity utilization and workload management
Product quality optimization
Smart metering

Key areas of improvement regardless of industry include process efficiency, risk management, governance, product quality. As per the Eclipse Foundation 2022 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption Survey report, the adoption of Edge Technology is such that:

53% of organizations are either utilizing or planning to utilize edge computing technologies within 12 months (from June 2022), while another 20% are currently evaluating the use of edge deployments.
23% of the respondents project spending between $100K – $1M in 2022, growing to 33% in 2023; 10% anticipate spending over $10M and growing to 12% in 2023.

The full report can be found here.

Low-Code – bringing IT and business in a single customizable solution

Low-Code is a methodology for the development of business solutions, which turns the development process into a playground for “business” and IT people. With it, they can merge their expertise into a working application. This allows to cover the technological and business development requirements of a company and embody them in tailored functionalities of an application. It is this culture that creates citizen developers – business people who leverage Low-Code platforms to create the necessary applications for the company.

What’s more, Low-Code business applications can be customized without limitation. The impact on the costs of an engineering department, because on average they spend more than 30% of their time building and maintaining internal tools. What are Gartner projections regarding Low-Code application development tools? We are expecting their flexibility and customizable functionalities to account for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024 and have a global market that produces $187 billion in revenue.

The application of Low-Code in different industries and in particular in asset management depends solely on the goals and requirements of the company. Technology helps to manage core business tasks covering everything from procurement to operations all the way to disposal.

For example, Low-Code enables you to create efficient data management and visualization solutions such as:

Centralized knowledge database that can be accessed across locations
Tools that allow users to monitor and alter key data components
Personalized dashboards и charts

Also, this methodology allows building integrations with any other data source and saves time from manually generating an API especially for legacy applications that weren’t designed to handle it. Low-Code API generators automatically create APIs based on existing application code.

An example from our practice of the effect of Low-Code technology in the Telecommunications Industry is our joint work with Excitel Broadband. Through Microsoft Power Platform functionalities, we’ve integrated Asset Insider with Excitel’s internal BI and financial systems to inform things like:

Stock availability of assets
Movement of assets through the company’s Supply Chain
The cost of maintenance and acquisition of assets

More so the power of low-code for rapid application development enables rapid “test and learn” for the solution without the need for significant upfront investment.

Do you want to know more about the impact from Low-Code technology? Check some of these reports:

Striving for operational excellence with the help of tech trends

These 6 technological trends are far from the only exciting ones in the field. Their application is prompted by the conscious need to update outdated practices in enterprises, to reduce the harmful impact on the environment, to limit excess costs… Instead of going on endlessly, we can simply say that everyone strives for more good work practices.