Asset Intelligence: One of the 12 Most Important Technology Trends
CIO Zone has a very good list of what they consider to be 12 of the hottest emerging tech trends for the enterprise. One in particular — Asset Intelligence — caught my eye. Here’s their synopsis:
Today, with advances in auto-ID, sensors, remotes and wireless devices, it’s now possible for any and all business assets to transmit data and initiate events. This provides companies with the opportunity to redesign their IT environment using assets — anything that’s important to the company. Asset intelligence provides information such as the temperatures and humidity levels of facilities and the location of raw materials. But being able to piece events together and respond to the signals generated by the assets proactively is what really makes this trend valuable.
A lot of companies look at asset maintenance and intelligence as a cost-conservatism function, which it certainly is. The more control and granular visibility you have over your assets, the better you can control depreciation rates, repair expenses and operational cost. This thinking is true, but nothing terribly new.
The part a lot of organizations miss is that technology now exists — really exists, not just in a fledgling state waiting for the brave enterprise to play with — to enable your assets to feed data into an intelligence/correlation/alerting engine. This means that very granular data can give rise to sophisticated events based on custom rules that allow your organization to respond to impending failures or problems before they occur. Your assets — once considered Excel-tracked inanimate objects that cost a lot of money per quarter to keep running — are now data nodes within your IT environment. Smart grid, anyone?
(A parallel: Consider the rules you likely have in place to monitor application performance. You probably have KPIs defined that are tied to alerts, and when one or two KPIs start heading south and tossing alerts all over your dashboard, you know you have an end-user situation imminent. But you can react and repair before the helpdesk lights up. Asset intelligence brings the same level of prediction and proaction to asset problems.)
We do a lot of work in the asset maintenance space here at MIPRO (you can download our widely-read whitepaper here). What we see, especially coming off the recession, is a tremendous surge in the number of companies who are pulling their assets into an integrated solution like PeopleSoft’s ALM suite. We’re seeing a migration away from best-of-breed solutions, mainly because the ability to integrate maintenance data into broader ERP systems like FMS, Project, Supplier and SCM pay huge dividends to the organization willing to do the governance and intelligence work up-front.
If you’re in an asset-intensive industry, asset lifecycle management is something you should check out, if you haven’t already (especially if you’re already a PeopleSoft shop). If you have checked it out but still have questions, email us and we’ll be happy just to chat with you.
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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.
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