Asset Management Moves Out

Computerworld - When you're in charge of IT for 17 energy plants—each responsible for converting up to 3,000 tons of waste into electricity every day—you don't want each plant to use a different format for critical maintenance data.

But that was the situation four years ago at Wheelabrator Technologies Inc., a $1 billion subsidiary of Waste Management Inc. in Hampton, N.H. The fast-growing company was adding plants rapidly but lacked adequate standardization of data and processes.

"They were all doing things slightly differently," explains Ernie Botte, director of information systems at Wheelabrator. "If I went to look for a furnace grate, it might have different part numbers, so I might not be able to tell what's in the inventory."

That lack of standardization threatened the company's ability to keep furnace downtime to a minimum—which could have hurt its bottom line: "If we're not running our furnaces, we're not making any money," Botte says. So he set out in search of an enterprise asset management, or EAM, system.

EAM combines functions involved in purchasing, maintaining and tracking corporate assets, such as plant equipment, cash registers or delivery trucks. EAM includes maintenance functions, such as scheduling repairs, as well as purchasing activities, such as putting out bids and proposals. It also has analysis tools to track how key numbers—such as emergency repairs per month—are meeting goals. And it provides a unified view of all enterprise assets so that companies with far-flung facilities can centralize and optimize the purchasing, usage and maintenance of those distributed assets. An EAM product may be stand-alone, with loose integration to an ERP, inventory, purchasing or other enterprise application, or it may be tightly integrated with, or even part of, an ERP suite.
In Botte's case, integration with Wheelabrator's J.D. Edwards ERP system was less of a concern than getting features that met Wheelabrator's specific operational needs. For instance, he wanted to create corrective work orders so that when a technician found that a repair was different than specified in the original work order, he could quickly issue a corrective order instead of resubmitting a new one. "There was a host of those kinds of criteria," Botte says. In the end, Wheelabrator chose TabWare from Greenville, S.C.-based AssetPoint.
Then came the challenge of implementation. That's when Botte decided to do something that's becoming more popular at large companies: He opted not to bring the software in-house. Instead, Wheelabrator subscribed to TabWare OnLine, AssetPoint's hosted version. "We have eight people in IT. We don't have the skill sets to run it ourselves," says Botte.