Articles - Visions Enterprise

By now, the benefits of cloud computing for asset integrity management (AIM) are well known. The ability to store all asset data securely in the cloud – thereby outsourcing the complex and expensive IT support and maintenance involved in hosting it in-house – can be leveraged for tangible and immediate cost savings. However, when it comes to selecting the right software for cloud-based inspection data management, things are not quite as cut and dry.

The immediate cost saving advantages of adopting a Risk Based Inspection (RBI) approach to asset integrity management are gaining momentum. More and more corporations are realizing that RBI, with its ability to intelligently analyze equipment’s probability of failure (POF) vs consequence of failure (COF), is the more prudent approach to managing their critical assets. It assures that a structured, systematic, and technically defensible approach is used to make decisions. After all, it drastically reduces instances of equipment failure and more than halves the likelihood of unplanned shutdowns.

When it comes to mitigating risk for critical assets, time is money. The old adage is especially true for owner operators still incurring unnecessary costs due to the dated method of time-based inspections for assets. Equipment failures cost the US refining industry over $4 billion per year, with two thirds of those costs being associated to failures of static equipment.

In the world of asset integrity, proper data management is critical. Those in the Oil & Gas, Chemical and Pipeline sectors are faced with an insurmountable amount of data with no feasible means of managing it. One of the most pressing issues they face is the lack of access to pertinent data on their assets.