Benefits

Across industries APM has been delivering major business benefits by focusing management on the areas where they can make a difference and how to do it. By working with real time data, it’s ability to analyse and monitor combinations of data sets and operating parameters helps managers to ensure they comply with regulations, protect their infrastructure and calculate and benchmark true unit costs against plans and past and peer performance.

With the support of APM managers are able to dramatically improve Returns on Investment through simultaneously reducing asset degradation and operating costs.

With APM the Chief Executive can establish Key Performance Indicators for those critical elements of his operations and have these monitored, as they happen, by the day, hour or even minute, as appropriate. Automatic benchmarking of the performance of processes can identify the areas that will benefit from management intervention, automatic trend analysis can identify cost efficiencies that are moving in the wrong direction and automatic reporting ensures that every member of his staff that needs this information, gets it when, where and in the format they need.

The Finance Director can add to his accounting systems links to process level data, in this way applying his financial measures and controls at the process level. The financial impact of increases in consumption or decreases in output can be identified and reported, as these happen, rather than at the end of the reporting period. AMP enables management accounting for critical processes, minute-by-minute and hour-by-hour.

By bringing together the concepts of financial control, process control and automated data processing, APM enables the accountant to overlay the engineers’ relative performance measures with the financial dimension, enabling cost per unit to not only be measured but also monitored, automatically. In this way financial measurement and reporting can be driven down into the performance of individual processes, enabling “real time” management.

The Operations Director can bring all of the process level data from instrumentation, controllers, and sensors etc. under his control. Analysis of this data that currently takes hours and days to carry out can be done automatically, with process engineering calculations included. Financial data can be included so that he can understand the impact of relative performance in terms of cost efficiency. In addition trend analysis can be used to monitor the performance of plant and equipment, diagnosing the cause of service alarms and even anticipating these before they arise. The Operations Director can make his decisions on the basis of the financial impact as opposed to just the relative performance. He can also make significant savings in consumption of consumables and maintenance and improvements in the serviceability of his plant and equipment. He can even use APM to manage his plant and equipment, remotely.

Plant Engineers can monitor the effectiveness of their maintenance activities by comparing equipment performance before and after the event. They can measure asset degradation and find relationships between operating conditions and their effects on plant health. They can use the calculation and reporting facilities of the system to determine root cause failures and to bench-mark equipment from different suppliers in terms of maintenance costs, reliability, energy consumption, emissions and use of consumables. Engineers can see the financial impact of their actions and ensure that any drive towards plant efficiency or quality compliance really pays off.

With Amulytics the MIS Director can add a whole new level of service to his business users. Currently the MIS Director gives managers access to the transaction systems in order that they can use the data to make operational decisions. Often that data is used as the basis of calculations, carried out by the individual, in order to interpret the information to his needs. These calculations can often be a critical element of business processes and as such part of the organisation’s knowledge assets. However, they are outside of the organisations control, being stored in spreadsheets, notebooks or even peoples own memory banks. There is little capability for MIS to manage either the security or quality control of this information asset.

Amulytics offers the MIS Director the opportunity to provide his organisation with a “corporate” calculation engine, which automatically collects data from databases, plant controllers, monitors and even external sources, applies complex mathematical calculations and publishes the results. The business user who regularly makes these calculations as part of his job can be freed from hours of work with spreadsheets and the organisation can be assured that those calculations are carried out consistently, and under the control of the MIS function.