Asset Monitoring

Asset monitoring, also known as asset tracking and a key feature of asset management entails a system of hardware and software that logs information about tangible assets, allowing a business to verify its assets' location and status.

An asset monitoring system also tracks an asset's name, type, usage, engine hours, maintenance schedule, or other information, and send alerts to pre-defined stakeholders (managers and maintenance staff), before anything goes amiss.

Asset Monitoring and Maintenance Optimization system adopts a responsive, IoT-enhanced approach to monitor and maintain assets to support any scale of operation or equipment. By suitably employing advanced sensors, actuators, and video, for Asset Monitoring and Maintenance Optimization relays performance data in real-time, to accelerate access to insights that enables truly predictive maintenance.

The asset management solutions help minimize the occurrence of costly and at times, unwarranted scheduled maintenance through condition-based monitoring to optimize asset performance at a minimal cost.

Hitachi's IoT enabled innovative digital asset management solutions in the critical Oil & Natural Gas Industry that offer realtime visibility into asset health is a suitable example.

Compressors are essential to Oil & Natural gas industry. Most of the compressor skids are expensive and tough to maintain. They provide little data vital to delivering insight that would predict and improve operations. Moreover, these compressors are hard to reach and situated in remote locations.

In the absence of access and lack of data, the operators are unable to minimise unplanned downtime and workers are compelled to address compressor issues by investigating the cause and commence subsequent repair. This is a cause of great concern as even a 1% downtime of a single compressor package can accumulate significant loss in gas production over a period of time.⁽²⁾

Furthermore, these operations demand years of experience to overcome challenges such as meeting stringent service level agreements for high mechanical availability that escalate the cost of operations.

To help oil and gas producers and service providers monitor asset-intensive environments, Hitachi is developing a proof of concept for an Internet of Things (IoT) solution for Real-Time Machine Event Analytics (Hitachi IoT solution). The Hitachi IoT digital asset management solutions allow operators and service providers to remotely monitor and manage natural gas compressor skids to detect compressor shutdowns, maintain operational efficiencies, predict failures and provide multi-compressor analysis.

Thus, by enabling real-time, remote monitoring of various components such as compressors, engines, and skids, the Hitachi IoT asset management solution allows operators to determine how much time each asset is up and running in a month. It also allows operators to understand emission levels to meet compliance requirements and gain visibility into occupational hazards to reduce escalating health, safety and environmental (HSE) incidents. Equally important, the IoT solution helps companies optimize asset utilization, getting the most from their investment.