Many manufacturers experience huge difficulty and bottlenecks when trying to get the right parts to the right place at the right time. As a result, workers regularly have to down tools and wait for key assets and materials to arrive before they can move on to the next stage of the process.
This is the fundamental problem that asset intelligence and the IIoT has the potential to solve. However, it can be daunting for teams to know how to incorporate this technology into their sites. For this reason, we have created The Asset Intelligence Ladder (AIL) to provide a step-by-step approach to implementation.
The Asset Intelligence Ladder is accessible to businesses of all sizes and levels of digital sophistication and focuses on the opportunity rather than the technology.
The first step is to agree who will drive the project forward – establish a team including people from a range of job functions and business units.
1. Key terms definition
The project team should address the key concepts and terms including asset, attributes, intelligence and location.
2. Asset classification
You should then classify assets against the agreed terms of reference. Initially this should focus on financial value, ranking assets by their capital cost. It is vital to include raw materials, components, accessories and equipment and to consider assets’ second-order values, especially the business or operational impact of their unavailability or loss.
3. Scenario storming
Now is the time to explore operational scenarios and their business implications in more detail. No situation is too trivial to be considered – it is important that as many process frustrations and bottlenecks as possible are identified and shared.
4. Use case prioritisation
Having captured the widest range of scenarios try and organise these disparate elements into potential, prioritised use cases.
5. Solution attributed
Consider what a solution would need to achieve – attributes are likely to start with location intelligence requirements e.g. indoor, outdoor or both, on-site, off-site or both, the level of geographic precision, and real time or not.
Ultimately, a business case will be determined by a comparison of the cost of waiting for assets, or the cost of process inefficiencies, versus the total-cost-of-ownership of the solution (including installation, maintenance, training etc.).
6. Pilot or POC project
The pilot project must be designed in such a way as to deliver a clear ROI to inform decisions on the scalability of the approach.
7. Business case delivery
The intelligence gathered across each of these stages will ensure you focus on measurable business impact.
We believe the Asset Intelligence Ladder (AIL) is an essential tool in helping firms build the business case for the wide scale industrial adoption of asset and process intelligence. For more information on the Asset Intelligence Ladder you can, download our latest report.