An emerging frontier, asset optimization utilizing Cloud Technology and services

Maximizing return on investment is a major focus for all corporations. Information is seen as the means by which to do so. This information is used to track performance and to improve the financial results primarily by optimizing the use of company assets. The ability and speed with which it is possible to gather information and distribute it with current technology to the organization is constantly increasing and, in fact, has surpassed the ability of industry to accept and utilize it. Today, production operators are overwhelmed with data as a result of an improved ability to monitor assets. Intelligent motor protection and intelligent instrumentation and condition monitoring systems often provide more than 32 pieces of information per device all with related alarms. Often operators are not equipped to understand or act on this information. Production companies need to leverage subject matter expertise for this purpose by locating their engineering staff in regional hubs. These engineers need to be equipped with sufficient knowledge to be able to interpret and take appropriate action to deal with warnings and alarms generated by these intelligent devices. The information available can be useful in finding ways to increase production, reduce unplanned maintenance and ultimately reduce down time. However, finding the information in real time, or getting useful information in real time without significant non-productive time spent making the data useful is a big challenge. This paper will introduce Cloud Technology as an economical method of gaining visualization and reporting to condition based data. It will then discuss the use of Cloud Technology to empower engineering resources with live data available in a secure format accessible through web browser technology. We shall cover the approach to asset optimization and the benefits found in several Cloud Services pilots and projects.