When managing the equipment used in social infrastructure, plants, and factories, it is vital to keep down inspection and repair costs while also carrying out improvement activities efficiently in order to maintain and improve equipment operation rates. In this context, ongoing maintenance, such as component replacement and regular cleaning before breakage, is important, rather than repairing equipment after it breaks down. The amount of equipment that has been in use for many years and which is now showing signs of aging is growing year by year, and even greater care is needed when managing this equipment. In this issue, we will look at Toshiba Digital Solutions’ enterprise asset management (EAM) solution for supporting the efficiency and automation of equipment management operations for factories, plants, and infrastructure such as electrical, gas, water, and road systems.

In recent years, labor shortages and a lack of progress in passing on the skills and know-how of experienced workers to the next generation have become frequently noted social problems. In the area of equipment management, as well, these problems are affecting maintenance operations, such as equipment inspections and repairs, in social infrastructure, plants, and factories. Much of the infrastructure equipment installed during Japan’s period of rapid economic growth has now reached the age at which it needs to be replaced, and maintenance operation processes need to comply with new industry standards and regulatory reforms. This social infrastructure is facing a mountain of challenges.

There is a rising chorus of compelling needs and requests from those managing equipment in the field: “We want to standardize and optimize our equipment maintenance operations” “We want to reduce our equipment maintenance costs” “We want to centrally manage and effectively use data collected from various equipment”

Equipment requires efficient management throughout every stage of the equipment lifecycle, from equipment planning to design, manufacturing, procurement, operation, maintenance, disposal, and reuse. To accomplish this, it is important to collect and centrally manage equipment lifecycle information so that equipment operators are always aware of the status of their equipment.

Equipment maintenance is one type of equipment management operation and consists of managing equipment to ensure that it always operates stably. This includes not only repairing broken equipment but also periodically replacing components and performing cleaning to maintain the equipment and quickly detect any problems. This equipment maintenance plays an important role in preventing equipment failures and increasing equipment operation rates. The key to optimizing the costs and personnel required for equipment maintenance is how to maintain equipment at the right time.

The same is also true for updating equipment. This is because even when dealing with equipment deployed at the same time, the state of equipment degradation will vary depending on where the equipment is installed, how often it is used, and how much of an operation load is placed on it. The cost of updating and the allocation of personnel for equipment updating can be optimized and levelized by identifying the degree of degradation and the risk of failure for each piece of equipment and then creating updating plans based on update priority for each device, rather than using the equipment service life as the sole criterion.

Toshiba Digital Solutions believes that identifying the right time to maintain and update equipment is vital to optimally managing equipment. That is why we offer WAOT (APM & AIPM Optimization-model Template), a capital investment optimization solution that recommends maintenance and update times based on equipment status.

WAOT is a solution that makes it possible to create optimized equipment updating plans while taking into consideration equipment risks, equipment updating costs, and operation workloads (Fig. 1).

Equipment risks are quantified using asset performance management (APM) based on equipment failure likelihood and the impact that equipment failure would have. Failure rates vary depending on the type of equipment, the environment in which equipment is used, the frequency of equipment usage, and the like, so these factors are used to calculate failure likelihood. The impact of failures includes not only the economic impact of equipment stoppage but also repairs and compensation for damage to the surrounding environment for certain types of equipment failure. The calculated failure likelihood and failure impact are plotted on a risk matrix to quantify and visualize failure risk (Fig. 2).

Asset investment planning and management (AIPM) uses the risks quantified by APM, combining this information with information regarding equipment updating work costs, component replacement work costs, workloads, and other information to formulate work plans. AIPM is used to organize all kinds of information, such as annual budgets, fiscal year-specific and area-specific work cost trends, the number of personnel and the amount of equipment required for projects, and the workload of personnel with the specialized skills that are needed for projects. It then uses this information to perform simulations under various conditions. The massive pool of potential combinations it produces can be used to formulate optimized equipment updating plans that help levelized overall work costs and workloads.

With WAOT, users can accurately evaluate equipment status and risks, create inspection cycles, repair plans, and update plans based on this data, and optimize their capital investment. For example, general power transmission and distribution operators that manage utility poles and steel towers can systematically maintain their equipment, starting with the equipment with the highest likelihood of failure. They can create realistic work schedules and update equipment at the right time, all the while keeping costs down.

Likewise, WAOT makes it possible to visualize risk for the large amount of infrastructure equipment that was installed during Japan’s period of economic growth and to optimize capital investment plans while ensuring the ability to update equipment with sufficient leeway.

Data from equipment is vital to effectively using WAOT. However, in many sites where equipment maintenance is performed, various systems have been installed to improve operation efficiency. This means that equipment data is scattered across multiple systems. Companies often express a desire to collect data in one location and to use the collected data to improve operation processes. To assist with the effective utilization of data, we provide an integrated equipment management system that integrates with multiple systems, shares data, ensures data integrity, and centrally manages the data.

This centrally managed data can then be leveraged in a variety of operations related to equipment maintenance. Carrying out equipment maintenance requires a wide range of operations to be performed in conjunction with many other companies and organizations. This includes formulating annual budgets, scheduling equipment shutdowns so that operation staff can perform inspections or repairs, revising drawings and figures in conjunction with equipment repairs and updates, procuring the materials and equipment necessary for this repair and update work, submitting work applications to supervisory agencies and local governments are required by laws and regulations, confirming work results with partner companies, paying partner companies, and more.

These operations are varied and can be highly complex, yet they are usually left up to equipment maintenance managers, saddling them with a heavy workload. This increases the likelihood that operations will be skipped or missed. To lighten the workload placed on maintenance managers, we assist with work standardization and automation based on this standardization. For example, until now, when maintenance plans have been completed, maintenance managers have been responsible for placing equipment and material orders, issuing work requests to partner companies, applying for work permission from supervisory agencies, and the like. Our system automatically assists with the creation of the information necessary for these activities, based on work schedules. The completed documentation is centrally managed, so personnel such as purchasing managers can look it up directly when they need it. When there are changes to maintenance work, replacement parts, or the like as a result of changes to laws, regulations, or maintenance policies, the affected work standards and procedures can be identified based on the centrally managed information and revised as necessary. Individual equipment maintenance plans (work tasks, applications, procurement information, budget information, etc.) will be revised automatically.

This helps reduce the workload placed on individual personnel, speed up operations, and improve quality. Orders can even be placed automatically for some inspections, maintenance managers can be informed when inspection times are approaching, and, if monitoring systems detect abnormalities, alerts and work instructions can be automatically issued.

Using the integrated equipment management system to centrally manage data not only enables the optimization of capital investment using WAOT, but also reduces human error and improves efficiency in a wide range of equipment maintenance-related operations.

The equipment investment optimization and central data management made possible by the WAOT and integrated equipment management system are the product of our many years of experience providing equipment management (EAM*) solutions for use in social infrastructure and plants, and the expertise we developed through this work. Our experience showed us there was a keen need for this optimization and central data management.

* EAM: Enterprise Asset Management. The system used to maintain and manage tangible company and organization assets throughout individual asset lifecycles.

We offer EAM solutions that are based on EAM packages widely used in the industry, optimally configured for individual customer operations and environments. They are based on IBM Maximo Manage (“Maximo”) or SAP S/4HANA Asset Management (“SAP EAM”). The approaches and implementation methods used for these two packages differ, which makes it vital to have expertise in configuring systems that are optimized for individual use cases, taking into consideration the status of customers’ existing systems, the scope of their business processes, the degree of standardization, etc.

For example, Maximo is suitable for customers who want to focus on equipment maintenance, such as performing legally-mandated inspections using proper procedures, without missing or skipping any steps. Maximo is highly expandable and integrates easily with other systems. These features, together with the configuration expertise we have developed through our extensive experience, make it possible for us to provide optimized configurations. These optimized configurations include existing systems, such as procurement and accounting systems, and can even be applied to large-scale systems.

For customers using Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) provided by SAP Japan Co., Ltd. for their production management, purchasing management, accounting, or the like, the SAP EAM is a great fit, because it lets customers leverage their existing operation know-how. To effectively use SAP EAM, we have prepared templates based on corporate configurations for which we have many long years of operation experience. These templates have functions that help shorten deployment terms, mitigate the effects of differences caused by changing business processes, and provide greater convenience.

Overseas packages sometimes use approaches that differ from Japanese approaches to operations. We provide customers with solutions that optimally utilize Maximo and SAP EAM based on customers’ individual situations, effectively leveraging the key points of these systems, for which we have extensive track records stretching back years.

In the field of power company power distribution, we created an integrated management platform for Chubu Electric Power Grid Co., Inc. capable of handling a massive one billion items of equipment information. Let’s look at this platform, the first of its kind in Japan.

Chubu Electric Power Grid operates and manages a prodigious number of power distribution facilities and equipment, over 34 million in total. This includes 130,000 kilometers of power distribution wires and over 2.8 million utility poles. It needed to be able to efficiently update this equipment and make appropriate risk decisions based on the level of equipment degradation and the state of individual equipment and facilities. Furthermore, it needed to introduce an asset management system capable of centrally managing different kinds of equipment management information, which at the time was scattered across multiple systems.

Chubu Electric Power Grid had already deployed Maximo to manage its smart meters, so it made the decision to build an EAM-based integrated management platform. Chubu Electric Power Grid chose us as its partner in this project, recognizing our achievement of building large-scale systems that use EAM packages to integrate related systems. Our system does not merely cover development, but consultation, requirement definition, development, operation, and maintenance, as well as implementing measures for creating more advanced next-generation EAMs that leverage AI, the IoT, and the like (Fig. 3).

With the creation of this new integrated management platform, Chubu Electric Power Grid now centrally manages basic information for over 34 million facilities and pieces of equipment, along with one billion items of equipment specification information essential for risk analysis. In the future, information regarding grid equipment used in power transmission facilities and substations will also be aggregated in this integrated management platform. Work is already underway on the creation of an environment that goes beyond just centrally managing equipment conditions to using digital twins to visualize the flow of electricity from the grid to power users.

* Click here for more information about the system being used by Chubu Electric Power Grid Co., Inc.

Toshiba Digital Solutions’ EAM solutions do not just manage equipment maintenance, but collect equipment operation information and information from various sensors via the IoT, apply AI and data analysis, and coordinate with other solutions to provide integrated equipment management. In the future, we would like to bring together a wide range of data in a single model to achieve further operation efficiency improvements, labor savings, and decarbonization.