With preventive maintenance IP that grew out of the nuclear power industry, Asset Performance Technologies brings the AI software company huge amounts of data about how industrial assets fail.<\/p>\n
In its latest bid to set itself apart from an increasingly crowded field of data crunchers,\u00a0Uptake\u00a0has acquired a little company with a big database. The acquisition of\u00a0Asset Performance Technologies\u00a0(APT) marries Uptake\u2019s predictive analytics software with the world\u2019s most comprehensive library of how industrial equipment fails.<\/p>\n
Growing out of an initial set of 39 core industrial components used by the nuclear power industry, APT\u2019s Asset Strategy Library (ASL) now has failure mode information for nearly 800 equipment types\u2014used along with APT\u2019s cloud-based Preventance APM software to optimize preventive maintenance in power generation, petrochemical, oil and gas, steel and other industries.<\/p>\n The major value proposition that APT brought to Uptake was really the library\u2019s content, notes Mark Benak, CEO of APT and now vice president of business ventures for Uptake. He labels it as \u201ccontent\u201d to denote the level of knowledge that goes beyond just data\u2014”capturing the knowledge of an aging workforce and structuring it into a library to make it useful,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Although industrial companies produce massive amounts of data, they can still struggle to understand what to do and when, notes Mike Guilfoyle, director of research and senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group. \u201cBy combining deep operational and equipment knowledge with predictive analytics, companies can take a proactive approach to asset management that converts data into business value, reducing capital outlays, and leading to efficiencies, safer operations and greater reliability.\u201d<\/p>\n With Uptake\u2019s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities, APT will be able to take the knowledge that has been useful for preventive maintenance and push it further into a predictive maintenance realm. \u201cWe\u2019ve been super impressed with Uptake, not only collecting that industrial data, but then making sense of it, using the artificial intelligence machine learning algorithms,\u201d Benak says. \u201cWhat that data is really telling me about what you should do now to make things better\u2014driving toward better outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n Uptake\u2019s technology will be able to provide more context around APT\u2019s data streams, Benak adds, \u201cproviding a better framework around the actual insights to improve the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n Likewise, APT\u2019s content and data will help Uptake\u2019s data scientists and AI learn faster, notes Matt Lehner, spokesman for Uptake. \u201cWe have to know how a turbine\u2014how anything\u2014fails in order to predict when it will fail,\u201d he says. \u201cKnowing the 55,000 ways that the world stops working helps our AI models learn faster.\u201d<\/p>\n Preventive maintenance was largely driven by the nuclear industry\u2014and for good reason, Benak notes. Accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the late 1970s and 1980s got the industry taking a more concerted look at reliability.<\/p>\n It is from the nuclear industry that APT\u2019s intellectual property comes as well. APT\u2019s co-founders, David Worledge and Glenn Hinchcliffe, began developing condition and environment-specific preventive maintenance information on nuclear plants in the late 1990s for the\u00a0Electric Power Research Institute\u00a0(EPRI). The ASL was an outgrowth of that initial project, and more than 30 EPRI members are still using versions of the product today.<\/p>\n The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the largest energy plant in the U.S., was an early adopter of APT\u2019s technology, using it for non-critical assets. \u201cIn the process of using our tools, they identified a valve they thought was non-critical, but it turns out it was a highly critical valve,\u201d Benak says. It was a single-point vulnerability, meaning that if the valve failed, the whole plant would trip\u2014translating to $2 million lost a day.<\/p>\n Through analysis, Palo Verde realized that it was missing a key maintenance step. \u201cThey\u2019ll change their strategy, include a new task, and implement that in their management system,\u201d Benak explaines.<\/p>\n APT\u2019s business has grown beyond the nuclear industry since its early days, \u201cbut that\u2019s a logical place for Uptake to get more traction,\u201d Benak says. \u201cNuclear has really driven technology in preventive maintenance. But it\u2019s really been behind the game in a predictive sense.\u201d Adding AI is a natural next step in the evolution of APT\u2019s technology, he adds.<\/p>\n Uptake has been deep into energy industries, with this acquisition showing a commitment to go even deeper, Lehner says. Besides the importance of the data analytics technology in keeping plants safer, he says, it also makes plants more competitive. \u201cRight now, in the power market, it\u2019s incredibly cutthroat on price, and rather turbulent,\u201d he says. \u201cAny opportunity where you can operate more efficiently will help you maintain or give you a competitive edge.\u201d<\/p>\n Uptake purchased APT for an undisclosed amount. All of APT\u2019s employees have joined Uptake. Worledge and Hinchcliffe, who are both at retirement age, are on a one-year transition plan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sources: https:\/\/www.automationworld.com\/article\/technologies\/data-acquisition\/acquisition-deepens-uptakes-foray-energy-and-other-asset<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With preventive maintenance IP that grew out of the nuclear […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1061,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n