How the Edge is transforming asset management in critical environments

Almost all asset-intensive industries (energy, water management, utilities, healthcare, transportation, oil, gas...) companies face major challenges such as: maximizing the performance of their assets, optimizing operational processes that often age and erode over time, and simplifying their complex technology infrastructures that often deploy applications and data in silos that limit the efficiency of operations.

Despite these challenges, companies' products or services must constantly evolve to meet market demands, as well as increasing global competition or compliance with legislation in the area of sustainability, health and privacy.

Asset management is important because it helps organisations to track, assess, manage and optimise the quality and reliability of assets. Many companies have hundreds, thousands, even millions of assets.

Assets are heterogeneous and include virtually any equipment needed to sustain production, services and operations. The Edge Industrial Barbara platform enables the deployment of AI for asset management, based on best practices to help maintenance teams gain greater control of critical environments:

• Centralising asset information: Barbara tells maintenance managers where an asset is, what it needs, who needs to work on it and when.
• Automating essential asset management workflows and facilitating access and control.
• Helping to solve problems before they occur: Barbara enables the Edge node deployment of applications AI-based preventive maintenance to ensure stable, automated and continuous operations.
• Monitoring assets more intelligently. Barbara's AI-based remote monitoring provides actionable information on current and expected asset states, aggregating data across departments and information silos, enabling fewer and more accurate alerts and improved decision making.
• Maximising asset utilisation: real-time and historical data collected from IoT devices, centralised diagnostics and analytics tools in Barbara help extend the availability, reliability and lifetime of physical assets.
• Managing infrastructure and obsolete assets: equipment lifecycles are extended through more informed maintenance strategies and by incorporating risk management into business processes to improve return on investment.
• Strengthening maintenance management: IoT, AI and analytics Improve equipment maintenance practices. While asset tracking and traceability ensure compliance with increasingly stringent environmental, health and safety regulations.
• Consolidating operational applications: thanks to the Barbara platform, we can establish a single technology system that manages virtually all types of assets. Processes are unified and standardised for the entire range of company assets.

A new computing model for asset management

Edge computing is rapidly transforming industry. Edge-based solutions provide "real-time" information to optimise the efficiency of operations for companies operating in mission-critical environments.

The Edge Industrial Barbara platform for asset management is a combination of software, systems and services to maintain and control assets and operating equipment through the Edge. Our mission is to optimise asset quality and utilisation throughout the asset lifecycle, increase uptime and reduce operating costs..

In the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), where everything is connected by sensors and systems, the next step is to incorporate advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) into asset management. Where data collected from assets is analysed using AI techniques, generating new insights that help maintenance teams make better decisions, improve efficiency, perform preventive maintenance and maximise investments in their physical assets.

Recommended reading: Top AI Trends at the Edge in 2022

Barbara enables the deployment of all these applications to improve efficiency, reliability and safety of assets in real time. Including control, security and assistance systems to prevent errors or damage. The Barbara platform helps you manage them in a simple, centralised and secure way.

The main benefits of managing your assets through the Edge are:

1. Scalability: by distributing the storage and processing of data across many locations, the growth of investment in infrastructure and capacity for higher traffic volume or better algorithms is much more controlled.
2. Increased security and data sovereignty: by controlling data from its source location and therefore deciding what and when to send to the cloud, the cybersecurity risks of theft or improper access to information are reduced.
3. Greater efficiency: data analysis frequencies from the edge allow working with thousands of data almost instantaneously, and analysis and response times are in the order of milliseconds. This allows for near-real-time use cases, unthinkable in cloud environments more oriented towards offline analysis of batches of information.

Reducing operating costs and improving data security by implementing real-time monitoring and diagnostics is now a reality for modern companies and a must for those who do not want to be left behind and want to maximise their operational efficiency.

Now they are also faced with having to reduce their environmental impact and this is where asset management through the Edge also has a role to play, providing real-time analytics and predictive information on operations and equipment and helping to optimise them from an energy and emissions point of view.

The ability to adapt to change by improving operations can mean the difference between survival and extinction. AI tools provide visibility and actionable information for today's dispersed assets. As the importance, risk, quantity or cost of corporate assets (critical or capital) increases, the importance of maintaining control and visibility of these assets becomes clear. And thanks to IoT, the Edge and Artificial Intelligence, there are more opportunities than ever to collect, consolidate and analyse asset information to help fine-tune asset performance.

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