Performance Monitoring Systems

Performance of Assets (Reliability)

Asset owners need to be able to measure the performance of their assets in order to assess their success in delivering the desired level of service.

The asset performance is often measured as reliability.

The quality of operations and maintenance, capital works programs, and the degree of system redundancy are the key factors in ensuring reliability, and are reflected in the cost of the service.

Conventional performance indicators as measured by the number of failures, etc do not adequately tell the full picture of the condition of the asset.

Performance information that can be analysed and acted on must be captured as part of the performance monitoring system. Inputs include:

• Types of failure
• Number of customers affected
• Degree to which the failure affected the target level of service
• Effects of these incidents
• Consequences of failure in an economic sense.

Asset owners need to be able to predict the point in time at which performance will drop to an unacceptable level, and communicate this to the customers or community.

Ultimately, a dollar value needs to be applied to these performance indicators to represent the ancillary consequences of failure costs.

These ancillary costs can then be added to the direct repair costs to show the total business costs of the failure.

These can then be used in the renewal decision making process.

SCADA Links to AM Systems

SCADA systems form an integral part of asset management.

Apart from their operational control they provide a key input to performance monitoring activities.

The SCADA system is a key component in life cycle asset management and should be integrated into the asset management system. Integration can include some or all of:

• Asset register - relate to the actual system element or asset that is being SCADA monitored by the system
• Maintenance management system - look at current maintenance activities or operating parameters of the assets. In some cases the SCADA system is directly linked to the maintenance management system, automatically raising work orders for any faults or problems that occur with the asset.
• ORDM process - system performance information can be used to derive the indirect costs of failure as part of the organizations risk assessment
• Operational data - asset efficiency, such as power consumption should be flagged and linked to the asset for appropriate rectification.

Each organization needs to identify those linkages that represent cost reduction opportunities for their organization.

It is important in designing and implementing the systems that some of the aspects of this vision are recognised and accommodated in future systems.