When I was a teenager I had a friend called Harry, who was a motorbike fanatic. As soon as he was old enough to ride a bike, he owned one. Every year that went by, he traded up until eventually he realized his dream of owning a Ducati. Harry wasn’t just interested in ‘racing cop cars’ and ‘putting the bike on its ear”, when he went round corners, he loved bikes. He was a talented mechanic – maybe he was born that way. Engines used to talk to him and he would listen. He could fix them when they went wrong and he could tune them to get the best from them. The last I heard of Harry was when he joined up with some motorcycle racing team in Liverpool.

Asset Performance Management

I thought of Harry during a recent briefing from Andy Hill, CEO of Oniqua. Officially, the best way to describe what Oniqua does is Asset Performance Management, but as it was explained to me, I thought of it as “tuning the production systems.” Instead of a mechanic with a wrench in his hands you have a performance expert with analytical tools at his fingertips.

Unfortunately asset performance management is a set of words that don’t convey a whole heap of meaning, unless you know the field. If we wanted to use related computer terminology, we could describe it as “process control” at the enterprise level, because it aims to optimize end-to-end processes in a manner similar to how process control systems optimize manufacturing and production processes. But before you run off with the idea that Asset Performance Management (APM) is process control, it isn’t.

Remember that process control systems are usually highly automated real-time systems that actively drive the whole process. An APM system is not a control system, it is an analytics system that reports on production systems and intervenes in them in order to optimize the end-to-end process. The purpose of its existence is to tune a production system, just as the purpose of my friend Harry’s existence was to tune motorbikes.

The diagram below illustrates how Oniqua works.

The first point to note is that Oniqua is an additive analytics system that feeds from data supplied by production systems. It gathers data from those systems, and then sends information back to them, to actively tune them. After it has gathered the data, it cleans it. The sad truth is that many systems, whether well known packages or built in-house, contain bad data. So Onequa needs to perform an ETL process on the data it gathers before it  stores it in a data mart for analysis.

Once it has the data, it applies a whole series of algorithms to it, which can be used to improve the way that production systems work. This is not a fully automatic process. It requires input from staff that understand both the production process and how the Oniqua Analytcs Suite works. As indicated in the diagram there are 4 areas of attack:

• Reliability
• Maintenance
• Inventory
• Procurement

Each of these areas is modeled and analyzed in order to generate more effective operational strategies and, in some instances, to feed detailed data (such as individual re-order levels) back into production systems.

The benefits of deploying Oniqua emerge in two stages.

1. The initial optimization is normally quite dramatic in its ability to pull cost out of the system. A reasonable rule of thumb is that there will be a 15% efficiency gain for an unoptimized system  which will usually translate into a 15% cost reduction in operational costs.
2. The second stage involves the on-going tuning of the whole process, the results of which will vary according to context. Inevitably, more costs will be driven out of the system as the analytics system gradually becomes a natural feedback loop that acts in concert with the production system it responds to market demand.

Oniqua provides its APM software as a direct license or via a SaaS capability, an option that is increasingly common these days. What it also provides, if the customers requests it, is business level consultancy to implement the capability. For companies that are unfamiliar with optimization activity of this kind, the fact is that they will need some assistance to embed it as a seamless part of their operational activities.

Oniqua’s natural customers are those companies whose prime activities are asset intensive, such the Oil & Gas industries, Mining, Steel, Utilities, etc. The fact is that very large organizations with a heavy investment in expensive assets have the most to gain financially from what Oniqua provides. It’s not that the tuning of operational activity wouldn’t make a difference to smaller operations, it would. It’s just that,right now, Oniqua hunts the bigger fish.