Intelligent Asset Mapping White Paper - Asset Management
Discover real-world cost savings and ROI analysis, showcasing how PlantQuest transforms facility maintenance operations and delivers tangible ROI.
Crebhan Hughes
15 min read
In the current landscape of manufacturing, in industries such as pharma, medical devices, and petrochemicals, the paradigms are shifting faster than ever before. As the demands for enhanced operational efficiency continue to rise, and stringent safety protocols are ever present, maintenance and facility leaders find themselves at a crossroads. In environments where every minute equates to either a profit gain or a potential compliance risk, lagging operational efficiency isn't just a hurdle—a critical business problem.
Today, process-intensive facilities have expanded into colossal landscapes of innovation, housing intricate processes and an increasing number of assets, often reaching into the tens of thousands. In the face of these evolving complexities, traditional asset management approaches are rapidly becoming obsolete. The industry needs an intelligent, dynamic solution for asset mapping and location. This need is not just about maintaining the status quo; it's about propelling facilities into a new era of operational excellence, safety, and continuous improvement.
High Turnover of Staff: The growth of pharma and similar industries has led to increased competition for staff, leading to a revolving door of operations, engineering, and maintenance staff as workers move from facility to facility this turnover significantly impairs the organization's collective memory and understanding of asset locations and tacit knowledge.
Time and Resource Drain: Thousands of work hours are squandered annually as teams scramble to both locate and navigate to fixed and mobile assets. This inefficiency echoes through the operational chain, resulting in costly delays and production downtime.
steep learning.
On-boarding Efforts: Newly hired engineers, technicians, and contracted workers face a steep learning curve from the first day on-site when it comes to learning a site's layout and asset geography. A lack of efficient asset mapping can extend this acclimatisation period from days to often months, further exacerbating inefficiencies.
Knowledge Silos: Experienced workers might possess extensive, yet incomplete, asset knowledge, be it in “excel mania” or custom drawings. These silos of expertise lead to inconsistent experiences and work outcomes, especially when tackling the elusive last 10% of assets that are often more challenging to locate.
Disperate Systems: Maintenance, BIM, IoT, calibration, building management, and other operational systems often function in isolation. This lack of integration creates data gaps that prevent teams from making informed, real-time decisions.
Mean Time to Repair: In corrective maintenance scenarios, the overarching goal is to minimize time to recovery. However, this aim is often compromised due to challenges faced of prompt asset and alarm location in the field.
Loss of Tacit Knowledge: Currently, there's no standardized platform to capture and share essential asset locations, videos, photos, or notes. When a seasoned worker leaves, or is simply tied up with additional work, their information is unavailable to other team members—representing an irreplaceable loss to the facility.
Navigational Inefficiencies: Even when workers know the location of an asset, the absence of route optimization tools results in wasted time and effort. Plus, workers are often uninformed about specific requirements for accessing particular assets or rooms, like Permits to Work (PTW)and access requirements, or specialized safety protocols.
Over-reliance on Outdated Tools: Excel sheets, complicated CAD drawings, and legacy systems, often personalized to an individual's understanding, are still the go-to solutions for asset location. These methods are not only outdated but also not scalable or easily understandable betweenworkers and departments.
Lack of Optimisation for Routine Checks: Workers often perform routine asset-related tasks without a standardized, optimized procedure. With these tasks often being carried out weekly or monthly by different individuals, this lack of uniformity results in significant time and resource waste due to workers not knowing the optimal way to execute the routine.
Navigating the maze of asset management in large process-intensive facilities presents several challenges. Yet, these challenges don't just disrupt operations - they come with a hefty price tag. The following conservative figures are based on reviews from our customers, and our experience having over 50 years of experience in maintenance and operational roles in large process-intensive facilities globally
Imagine about how much time you would spend planning and executing a route in your personal life without Google maps!
Downtime in the pharmaceutical industry can cost on average between $100,000 and $500,000 perhour, with some incidents costing $20,000 a minute, equating to $1.2M per hour (Kruglyak, 2021).Even if we take a conservative estimate, a single hour of downtime can be detrimental. Delays inlocating assets or alarms, can often contribute to such downtime scenarios.
The total cost of the inefficiencies doesn't account for other unqualified but significant costs, such as extended production downtime due to delayed asset and alarm location, lost institutional knowledge, and system inefficiencies. In a competitive industry where efficiency is key, these costs aren't just numbers—they're leading indicators of an operational model that requires transformation. PlantQuest's intelligent asset mapping solution addresses these challenges, offering a robust, scalable, and cost-effective solution that's tailored for the complexities and demands of modern process-intensive facilities. By investing in intelligent asset mapping, facilities stand to recoup these losses, enhancing operational efficiency and turning hidden costs into visible profits.
PlantQuest digitizes large process-intensive facilities, allowing customers to transform their site operations with intelligent asset mapping. PlantQuest’s ability to combine and layer multiple data sources allows workers to make data-driven decisions, locate and navigate to all assets(fixed & mobile), reduce alarm response times, and lock in critical site knowledge. With the ability to integrate with existing facility systems, the PlantQuest platform has been designed to be deployed within all sites. From the oldest legacy and brownfield facilities to the most cutting-edge greenfield sites
The benefits of incorporating PlantQuest into your operations are numerous and impactful. The platform brings significant time and resource savings, empowering your maintenance and facility teams with efficient tools for work execution. It optimizes resource utilization, helping to save countless hours and thereby increasing your team's output. PlantQuest revolutionizes asset and data location, allowing you to locate any asset and its associated data instantly, which contributes to a reduction in maintenance backlog. The system enhances data utilization by integrating location intelligence into your existing data and systems. Routine tasks like P&ID walk-downs and GEMBA walks can be completed in a fraction of the conventional time, boosting overall efficiency. Additionally, the platform serves as a powerful tool for strategic planning, facilitating the effective planning and scheduling of maintenance, shutdowns, and production operations.
PlantQuest is designed from an integration-first perspective. This enables our ability to seamlessly integrate with a myriad of systems used within your facility. Designed to be as versatile as it is robust, PlantQuest makes sure that adopting our system doesn't mean sidelining your existing investments, but rather leveraging its data and providing additional insights otherwise not attainable.
Visual Context: PlantQuest goes a step further by adding visual context to your existing facility systems. It’s one thing to have data; it's another to understand what that data means in the real world. The system reveals crucial insights about locations, conditions, status, and other important metrics, turning raw data into actionable information.
Non-Disruptive: The integration of PlantQuest is designed to have no impact on current qualified systems. This ensures a smooth integration and immediate deployment, without any operational hiccups or procedural overhauls.
Seamless Metadata Updates: Any update made to asset metadata in your existing systems can be automatically integrated into PlantQuest, ensuring that your asset management is always up to date.
Centralised Asset Management: With PlantQuest, you gain a centralized view over all assets, ensuring you can view the latest information for an asset, in one platform, with live links from PlantQuest back to the original source of the data.
PlantQuest is not just a one-sise-fits-all solution. The platform is designed to grow with your facility and organization. As you add new systems or evolve existing ones, PlantQuest can easily be scaled to meet those needs, ensuring that it remains a long-term solution for your asset management requirements. Integrating PlantQuest into your existing operational ecosystem not only enhances efficiency but also opens doors to new levels of insights and control. The power of PlantQuest lies not just in what it can do on its own, but also in how it can amplify the capabilities of your existing systems.
PlantQuest is pioneering revolutionary changes across process-intensive facilities. Leveraging cutting-edge technologies, PlantQuest delivers unparalleled operational improvements and cost savings.
“The PlantQuest system has become integral to my role” Facilities Manager
Pharmaceutical giant transforms facility operations with goals of reducing downtime, enhancing efficiency, and optimizing task execution.
Spanning 12 buildings and 4 levels, workers faced difficulties in locating assets resulting in unnecessary downtime and inefficiencies. Furthermore, with countless tasks requiring walk-downs each week, these tasks where not optimized.
PlantQuest's platform was seamlessly deployed with zero impact on the site operations. This allows workers to instantly locate and navigate assets and shared tacit knowledge from colleagues throughout their facility on both desktop and table.
- Reduced journey times by 50%.
- Reduced alarm response by up to 75%.
- Removed the need to escort contractors throughout the site.
- Routine task execution has been transformed, with the average task executed 50% to 70% quicker when using PlantQuest.
A front-runner in global pharmaceuticals, the client runs state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities across the U.S. and Europe.
Workers across multiple disciplines including maintenance, calibrations, and production faced difficulties in locating mobile assets and equipment. This resulted in costly production delays, time lost in the field when locating assets for maintenance, extended waiting times of production vessels, and under-optimization of maintenance and calibration equipment.
PlantQuest’s Industry 4.0 Mapping Technology was deployed in line with the customer's unique requirements, allowing for the seamless location of all mobile assets whilst providing dynamic alerts and real-time updates.
- Removed all wasted time in locating asset sand equipment.
- The geo-optimization of tasks and equipment across the facility allows for an increase in maintenance output.
- 50% reduction in production vessel wait times after cleaning.
- Increased production of additional batches, equivalent to €860,000/year.
The following is an analysis of real-world scenarios, and how PlantQuest can demonstrate strong ROI.The analysis aims to highlight how PlantQuest can improve efficiency, and reduce the costsassociated with facility maintenance.
PlantQuest is offered on an annually recurring license alongside an implementation cost. The recurring license is dependent on the number of users, modules, and integrations required, whilst the implementation cost is dependent on facility size and the assets mapping process. Learn more about this here. The adjacent costs are the average investment costs of our customer experience.
Initial ROI
€100,000 / 51,046 =
1.96 Years
Year 3+
€25,000 / 51,046 =
0.5 Years
When taking into account the cost implications faced due to lost time locating and navigating to alarms and assets as previously outlined above. To recap:
Initial ROI
€100,000 / 167,630 =
0.59 Years
Year 3+
€25,000 / 167,630 =
0.15 Years
Tested and certified by world-leading pharma organizations for global deployments, PlantQuest meets the highest standards in data protection. PlantQuest are in the process of working towards ISO 27001 and SOC2 accreditations. We aim to provide a secure platform that you can trust to manage all your data needs.
"At PlantQuest, we recognise the critical nature of security in the digital age. Partnering with some of the world's most security-conscious enterprises, we ensure our software safeguards sensitive data and complies with all legal, industry, and regulatory standards. Our team is devoted to maintaining transparency around our robust security measures." Kieran Desmond, PlantQuest DTO
PlantQuest operates on a Cloud-based system and leverages a mix of online and offline-capable tablet applications for field use. This ensures access to asset locations and information no matter the environment when being used in the field. These applications are built to enterprise production-grade, enabling high-performance execution of our physical world model algorithms.
The Cloud system is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), incorporating best practices around architecture and security. It serves a dual purpose:
- A data API for the tablet applications and integrations with existing facility systems
- A Web-based User Interface for asset location and data & device management
Supported by an industry-standard cloud security framework, ongoing testing and monitoring of all controls and countermeasures are performed. Each PlantQuest deployment is provided on a single-tenant basis per client, ensuring that data remains isolated and secure, preventing cross-pollination between clients. You can learn more about this here.
PlantQuest is optimized for both green and brownfield deployments, with a typical brownfield deployment lasting 10 weeks. Typically comprised of 5 steps, PlantQuest manages the entire deployment process, requiring very little input from the client.
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The evolving landscape of large-scale, process-intensive facilities, such as pharmaceutical, medical device and petrochemical plants, presents a complex set of challenges to operations and maintenance teams. From high staff turnover and time-consuming asset location tasks, to navigational inefficiencies, and disparate systems, these challenges significantly impact both operational efficiency and the bottom line. This white paper has clearly illustrated the financial impact of these operational inefficiencies, to the tune of €167,630 per year in time loss alone when locating assets.
PlantQuest's intelligent asset mapping platform emerges as a transformative solution to these challenges outlined above. By digitizing facility operations and offering a unified, data-driven platform, PlantQuest not only reduces wasted hours and operational costs but also enhances the quality of decision-making, route optimization, and overall operational efficiency. These case studies highlight impressive gains—ranging from 50% to 75% reductions in various metrics—that speak volumes about the ROI achievable through our platform. Even on a conservative scale, the payback period for investing in PlantQuest is remarkably short when considering the broad utility of the platform beyond mere routine tasks.
Furthermore, PlantQuest is designed for seamless integration, ensuring that your current systems can be leveraged more efficiently without any disruptive overhaul. Its cloud-based infrastructure, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), ensures a secure and reliable data management environment.
In a world where operational excellence is not just a goal but a defining criterion for competitive survival, PlantQuest offers a vital, scalable, and robust solution. By investing in intelligent asset mapping technology, facilities can turn operational challenges into opportunities for improvement, transforming hidden costs into visible profits and laying the foundation for a smarter, more efficient future.
To learn more about PlantQuest, visit www.plantquest.com, or contact the team atinfo@plantquest.com
