What is effective management?

There is no need to be a rocket scientist in order to clearly understand a simple thing: the more integrated and compatible are the systems and tools for managing all processes, services, equipment and repairs in an enterprise, the more clearly you can control all the processes inside and outside the business and therefore the final product or service will be of high quality.

So why, then, are we still trying to rely on the vaunted "crisis managers" and "high-class managers", whose only task is to understand business well as a single whole and living organism, where everything is interconnected, and the quality of the janitor’s work affects the performance of -managers? After all, in essence, the only thing that needs to be done is to integrate and launch such a system of information support for decisions and management of physical assets that can determine the role of each of its participants, give him a portion of duties and monitor their execution. This is easy to say and much harder to implement, especially if we are talking about large, trans-national companies and corporations that rarely specialize in “pencil making”. Energy, logistics, banking today has become complicated to such an extent that management needs specific tools in order to adequately (in time and effort) and effectively manage an operating, that is, current, activity.

But in order to argue on this topic, it must be supported by facts. Therefore, it is from this that I will begin - with the facts.

Fact one - physical assets

Physical assets, or funds - this is what is used by the enterprise to obtain the final product, which is supplied to consumers. In the oil industry, these are oil rigs and refineries; in logistics, these are means of transport, ways and means of communication (airplanes, trains, cars). In a general sense, for most companies and various types of businesses, physical assets are cash, equipment, stocks in a warehouse, as well as property owned by the business. Their opposite is, respectively, intangible assets - intellectual property, software, agreements, as well as your intellectual capital, used to ensure that the entire business brings tangible results, that is, profit.
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This seems obvious at first glance, but it is important for me to emphasize the difference between physical assets (hereinafter referred to as funds) and accounting assets, that is, the left side of the assets / liabilities balance. Now that everyone understands what funds are, you can go on.

Fact number two - integrated funds

Imagine a situation in which you, a person of flesh and blood, would try to use the intelligence of another person, as your own, without involving this very third-party person in your immediate work. Fantasy? More than.

But in fact, something like this looks like an example of inept use of physical assets. When a company that owns plants, workshops, warehouses, equipment, delivery service, etc. trying to build the work of each of these elements without forming a single chain, this is exactly like trying to create something that no one has a clue about. Another example from the same series is a team of highly qualified specialists, each of whom speaks their own language (the situation is already more realistic). As long as they are not integrated, that is, they do not develop one normative language of communication, the work will not begin.

Now you understand why integrated funds are better distributed in terms of managing them. Absolutely everything depends on their reliable operation in business: the quality of the product, the timeliness of its production and delivery, and the fulfillment of other requirements. This is the reason why in the modern economy a huge role is given to the discipline of managing funds and information systems, due to which they exist (in modern business most of the funds are information that is of paramount importance).

Fact Three - Unified Integrated Funds Management System

In addition to integration, most funds have another vulnerability - is their management. Imagine that you are the general director of an oil producing company, whose deposits are scattered over the entire area of ​​a huge state, such as the Russian Federation - this is exactly what it looks like in reality. You need to create a centralized distributed asset management system in order to monitor the performance of each individual part of the total chain in real time. It is critically important that there be no production delays, the extra steps are taken from the supply chain, and the product quality is consistently high.

This is a complex and complex problem, the solution of which is beaten by the brightest minds, but only in recent decades has a solution begun to appear that is now available to anyone. Those who want to reduce costs in the first place, and build a business aimed not only at making a profit, but also at surviving in any conditions.

Western researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom, who conducted research in this area, say the following: reasonable and effective building of maintenance processes will reduce equipment downtime by 5–20% depending on the industry, its useful life will increase by 5–30%, and staff productivity by 5-50 (!)%. One and a half times more work means one and a half times more profit.

Another reason why funds management systems are very much in demand today is in modern environmental regulations and standards, as well as the timely detection of critical safety issues. Nobody wants a repetition of the Chernobyl history, or the second Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric station, no one needs another Raspadskaya mine. The increase in the reliability of assets and the increase in their life cycle is another factor arising from the efficient use of funds.

What does IBM have to do with it?

It's simple: IBM has been developing EAM systems for several years now (Enterprise Asset Management - management of corporate funds). It all started with the acquisition of MRO Software in 2006, after which IBM incorporated its own developments into MRO products and has since been the market leader in efficient asset management systems (Gartner data for 2010). In order to understand why the IBM solution compares favorably with all competitors, I, perhaps, will attach a picture.



The Maximo platform has one very important quality - it is a designer that includes all the subsystems and components necessary for the organization of a single physical asset management system. This is a single solution for all types of funds: industrial, transportation, energy, infrastructure, utilities and, of course, IT assets.

The wiring diagram of the necessary modules allows achieving two goals:
1. Eliminate unnecessary items
2. Include required items

This seems logical to be banal, but in fact, not all similar platforms allow you to perform these two elementary operations, as a result of which people who have to work with these tools are confused in their functionality and purpose, and sometimes do not understand at all, “why all this? need to".

IBM Maximo consists of four main components: I. single interface; Ii. unified configuration tools; Iii. unified processes and iv. single data subsystem. All tools work within a single system where integration of internal mechanisms is not required. Adding a new module does not require special configuration, and therefore saves time and money.

IBM went in a revolutionary way, presenting fund management in the form of service management (because the work of a physical asset, in essence, is a service, that is, a service).

The Maximo interface is built on the basis of the J2EE architecture, and therefore does not require the installation of client software or hardware in the system — users work with the system using a browser, which removes narrow compatibility issues.

The principle of "role access" is another interesting point that IBM has integrated into its product. Each system user is assigned a certain role in the overall work, and the program interface adapts to this role, providing exactly the amount of functionality that is necessary for the performance of duties.

Combining all of the above, we can state the last fact:

Fact Four - a software product that is a single tool for automating all physical asset management processes, ensuring complete integration and interaction of users in the framework of current processes, supports a single security model and implements escalation of emergency measures in case of problems, will be close to the ideal product, one implementation and learning to work with which will begin to bring tangible benefits to the entire business.

I have already talked about how an effective system for managing and transporting baggage based on RFID tags was organized at the Dutch Schiphol Airport, but in fact the Maximo platform allows much more: to see all the information coming from the funds in real time and understand what needs to be done in order to optimize the production chain or increase the efficiency of many processes.

Let me give another example - the concept of “smart building”, which today is very actively developing all over the world and contains more than a dozen of fundamental principles (environmental friendliness, energy efficiency, etc.), implies the integration of all systems into a single information system with a centralized point The "exit" of information is IBM Maximo. This platform allows you to bind heterogeneous information to assets and consider their mutual relationship, that is, the influence on each other. For example, an air conditioner installed in such a building will be part of the air conditioning system, a component of the energy supply and energy saving system. You will see all the roles that one or another asset performs - more recently, similar data were greatly distorted, and if more precisely, the data obtained from such systems were very narrow.

Why is this integration necessary? For a clearer picture of what is happening, based on analytical systems and tools for information support for decision-making. I think that this is obvious - the more you know about the role that one or another part plays in the work of a single mechanism, the more you understand about the whole mechanism. This is the ultimate goal of the creation and existence of platforms such as Maximo.

Finally, a small success story, and in the next publication I will talk about examples of real implementation of the platform in Russian enterprises and what result this brought to business as an interconnected organism.