Software solutions

Competition in the global asset management software sector is strong, with a number of firms vying for business.

It’s an old story, not only in the Middle East, but all over the world. You have a large utility company that opted to build its own in-house software in, say, the 1990s to cope with various different processes.

But fast forward 10 or 20 years and that legacy software is absolutely helpless when it comes to offering all the solutions that modern IT can provide.

While other companies are seeing the impacts of real-time monitoring and the integration of the various arms of their business, your company is lagging behind. So what steps can you realistically take to improve matters?

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The onus is on each firm to maximise the use of its assets, whether these are plants or distribution networks, to ensure that they offer the most value and minimise costs throughout their lifecycle.

“So on a macro level, management of this capital asset can be seen as one large project, and the technology used to operate and administer such an industry must allow for full Asset Lifecycle Management [ALM],” explains Ian Johnson, sales manager for IFS Middle East.

“From a complex task like a seasonal shut-down for maintenance and refit, to a small task like the rebuild of a single pump, absolutely everything that happens to this asset must be managed and accounted for in an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) tool, and that EAM tool must tie into the general ledger of the enterprise and with the overarching ALM technology used to administer the asset,” Johnson adds.

Typically, a successful implementation of asset management software should be able to actually increase your asset’s lifecycle.

“You can not only expand that lifecycle, but you can also reduce disruption to your clients,” says Bastian Fischer, vice president and general manager, EMEA, at Oracle Utilities, which includes local giants like Palm Utilities and ADWEA in its customer base.

And by optimising internal processes, you can offer your staff more time in which to operate. “This means that technicians do not waste their time in locating the right pieces on the truck or having to go back and forth between the storage location and workplace, but they have resources, tools, machines, and HR integration at the sites where they are needed,” adds Fischer.

“This means that the best interests of the both the client and the utility are kept at heart.”