Amulytics - Philosophy of APM

APM Philosophy

The Importance of Data

In today’s business environment data overload is a real problem. All businesses have invested hugely in the collection and storage of data. Unfortunately these data are normally stored in many disparate systems and the task of making sense of the information hidden within these data sets is time consuming and labour intensive. Data retrieval and analysis can no longer be a priority for over stretched IT departments and yet contained in these data are the keys to improving your business performance.

This leaves managers and engineers with the unrewarding task of manually collecting and retrieving their own data sets of interest and manipulating them in other packages – usually Excel. This, in turn, leads to islands of data, usually not controlled, and relies on individuals’ knowledge for the production of useful business driven results. This reliance on personal solutions has huge penalties in terms of staff training and employee turnover. If an engineer or manager produces valuable information from his personal solution there is a risk to business efficiency if he or she leaves the company or is assigned to other tasks.

The APM software system has been designed to overcome this risk whilst simultaneously allowing access to all the data sets in a business from one central location. There are other packages available today which claim to solve these problems unfortunately, they rely on the users ability to write software to solve their problems and produce meaningful results.

Philosophy

At C3 we realise that this is not an efficient use of people’s valuable time. APM has been designed to enable solutions to real business problems and provide real time indicators on the performance of the business without the need to write software to achieve these results. It does this by providing a common user interface to all of your data sources and providing a straight- forward set of tools for performing simple or complex calculations. This ability to build calculations using data from all data sources ensures that the true relationships between what is happening in processes and their performance and financial implications can be understood. This allows a more proactive approach to business decision-making and takes the guesswork out of problem solving.

APM is an on-line system capable of handling both continuous and discrete data. Once calculations have been set up, they run automatically as soon as new data becomes available. Reports are built automatically and delivered to the people who need to see them. They can also be viewed across the company intranet and, if required, accessed remotely via the internet. Once AMP is up and running most users need only use these reports and web pages to make real-time business decisions.

Data source independence is the key to APM’s ability to perform useful business calculations. APM uses multiple data sets to derive its results; we call these calculated parameters. Calculated parameters (CPs) are treated in the same way as directly measured variables and can therefore be used by the alarm handling package, the graphics and reporting tools. The CPs can provide data normalised against other data. For instance data can be normalised against population, temperature, process flow etc. This ability to normalise data against the operating environment can be used to answer questions like:

Do we use more energy when the ambient temperature is lower/higher?
If so can we schedule activities more cost effectively?
How do our assets perform compared to each other?
Do we carry too much stock at certain times of the year?
Are our raw materials orders matched to our throughput?
At our given production rate when do we need to re-order raw materials?
Are our maintenance costs related to:
- Equipment age?
- Supplier?
- Maintenance Team?
- Location?

APM’s ability to answer questions such as these is limited only by one’s imagination. Calculated parameters can be used to derive the Key Performance Indicators to allow the measurement, in cash terms, of the performance of the business.

APM has been designed to ensure that the decision makers, managers, engineers, finance departments and IT personnel have access to the information they need to make a valuable contribution its success.

APM is easy to use and maintain, capable of extremely complex business centred calculations and requires no specialist programming skills.

APM is used daily on a global basis by some of the world’s largest corporations. C3 has close relationships with all of its clients and this partnership ensures that the software continually evolves to meet the needs of our clients across a large number of industries.