Achieving CBM using NOW Platform Capabilities 

The article talks about achieving Condition Based Maintenance Maturity using NOW Platform Capabilities 

We go over the following topics in the pages:

 -   Condition Based Maintenance (CBM)

 -   CBM and Business Capability Model

 -   Bringing CBM to 'life' on NOW Platform (Use Cases)

 -   Summary

What is Condition Based Maintenance (CBM)?

The 5 Steps of the Maintenance

Maturity Model

Condition Based Maintenance is considered to be that baseline and building block for next maturity levels

It has been observed that most of the organization currently operate in either Level 1 (Corrective) or Level 2 (Preventative) and strive to achieve Level 3 (Condition – based). 
 
One of the “Analysis – Paralysis” conundrum that these organisations often fall into is striving for Level 5 Maturity without understanding the dynamics of the business strategy and current maturity level. This drive for ‘excellence’ may prove counterproductive and often cost prohibitive in the long run. Hence target maturity model that complements the overall strategy for the organisation must be carefully selected, chartered, and communicated from top management across organization
 
The goal of condition based maintenance is to monitor and spot upcoming equipment failure so maintenance can be proactively scheduled when it is needed – and not before. Asset conditions need to trigger maintenance within a long enough time period before failure, so work can be finished before the asset fails or performance falls below the optimal level.Condition Based Maintenance is considered to be that baseline and building block for next maturity levels.

Step 1: Corrective 

In this level, an asset is fixed only after it fails. Maintenance is deferred until it actually has to be dealt with. 

Step 2: Preventative 

Here, assets are fixed prior to failure. Preventative maintenance is planned, scheduled, and coordinated.

Step 3: Condition-based 

In this stage, alerts are delivered that center around a single failure point. The issue, of course, is that it doesn’t consider the asset’s health as a whole, but instead breaks it down on a micro level.

Step 4: Predictive 

This is based on measurement and fixing based on findings. Here, asset maintenance is predicted through analysis and evaluation, then planned, scheduled, and coordinated. This level is focused on ongoing monitoring.

Step 5: Prescriptive 

This level seeks to eliminate defects, improve overall precision, redesign elements that are no longer working, and get the best and most efficient processes and operations from the asset. 

CBM and Business Capability Model

A business capability model or business capability map (BCM) provides structured graphical representations of all organizational business capabilities, their relationship and hierarchy. 

To enable and accelerate maintenance maturity across organization, there are business capabilities (Primary and Secondary) which have to be aligned from People, Process and Technology perspective.

How does Business Capability Model affect CBM Competency?

Business capability models represent high-level views of an organization from the perspective of its business capabilities. A typical manufacturing BCM can be represented as below:

A representation of these capabilities that impacts manufacturing across organization can be depicted on the next diagram:

To achieve CBM level of maturity, the organization must embark on a journey towards maintenance reliability framework that aligns maintenance departments with other departments like IT, Supply Chain and Inventory, HR to build integrated approach towards maintenance maturity.

This maintenance maturity is aimed towards lengthening of asset life to ensure maximum RoI towards CAPEX investments. This can help Utility industry in asset life, Manufacturing industry in product life cycle management and overall managing Risk across organization.

Bringing CBM to “life” on

NOW Platform

CBM Process (Utility Use Case)

A typical CBM process can be broadly classified into 4 sections as follows: 

Section A – Awareness – Bringing OT Signals into IT Environment

1. Automation networks and most of OEMs provide ability to collate and aggregate operational alerts (OT Signals) 
2. The Edge Devices can be used as data collectors, aggregators, and transmitters of operational signals from OT environment to IT environment generally into a data lake
3. 3.     This set up is generally site based and is managed by site supervisor. The transmission of signals across multiple sites can also be grouped based on signal type and site types 

Section B – Association – Bringing ‘meaning and context’ to OT signals by overlaying Geographical information  

1. It has been observed that the signals / alerts coming from the assets may not have the required site location / geographical information.
2. To provide the geographical context to the alerts coming from the assets, there is a correlational mapping applied between alerts and GIS. This correlation logic is managed in data lake and integrates with GIS or Asset Database 

Section C – Analysis – Bringing Analytics and Visualization to provide ‘Platform of Action’ 

1. Integrated CBM platform brings the correlated alerts from operational assets on to single platform 
2. CBM platform has 3 main areas:

• Analytics Engine – This engine analyses the OT signals and compares with the tolerances set according to the business rules. This helps the maintenance team to monitor signals coming from the OT Assets 
• Visualization – This helps the maintenance team to visualize the signals and highlight when the anomalies are detected. This helps creating trends and historical data around asset health
• Events – This helps maintenance team to perform downstream actions. For e.g. generating a work order (pro-active or investigative) to check the anomalies highlighted by analytics and visualization

Section D – Action – Integrating with downstream systems (FSM, Work Order, Inventory Management, Competency and Learning) 

1. Depending on the action generated through integrated CBM platform can be triggered in downstream systems. These downstream systems can be Work Order, FSM, Inventory Management
2. Based on the Maintenance maturity of the organization, the work order can be integrated with FSM, Inventory Management, Competency Management, Maintenance Documentation and SOPs

NOW Platform capabilities for Utilities

ServiceNow is a cloud-based workflow automation platform that enables enterprise organizations to improve operational efficiencies by streamlining and automating routine work tasks. The Now Platform provides a common user experience, workflow and integration framework as well as a powerful platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for building and delivering custom solutions.

Using a single data model, it makes it easy to create contextual workflows and automate business processes. The platform's Intelligent Automation Engine combines machine learning with automated actions to dramatically reduce costs and speed up time‑to‑resolution.

Summary

Desired maturity of Maintenance Reliability can be achieved through adoption of a well-defined and companywide communicated framework. The key to success is to ensure the departments and stakeholders that affect the maintenance framework (customers, workforce engineers, supply chain and inventory, system of records) share a common view of the workflow which can be managed via NOW Platform.

This approach will certainly help to leverage investments in existing System of Records and create the orchestration required.

For more information:

Amogh Dhamankar
Business Consultant and Architect professional with 20+ years of experience of Business Transformation, IT Investment Planning, Stakeholder Management and Enterprise Capability Assessment across geographies. 

- Strong domain knowledge in Energy and Utilities

- Passionate about contributing towards use of technology to enable Digital Transformation

- Transformation and Technology roadmap development including business case – benefits definition and realization

- Build and leverage relationships with executive stakeholders to drive business outcomes
- In-depth knowledge of HR (Success Factors), Procurement (ARIBA) Cyber Security (Intrusion Detection System)