An installed base evaluation (or IBE) can help you make data-driven business decisions to ensure your plant can stay up and running even if you experience an untimely failure.

Do you ever find yourself looking for a better understanding of the parts that make up machines in your facility? What parts are critical to your process? What is the current lifecycle status of the critical components? Are they even still available? What happens if one fails, bringing production to a halt? If you have ever had thoughts like these, believe me—you are not alone. As an asset management specialist, I have had the opportunity to speak with many of our customers that were wondering the same thing. An IBE can answer questions like these.

Comprehensive Parts Analysis

Much more than simply counting parts, a Rockwell Automation® Installed Base Evaluation is a thorough analysis of your critical plant assets and their condition. This service provides the knowledge you need to make data-driven decisions regarding your installed base assets' support and obsolescence management.

An installed base evaluation can help you:

• Reduce Costs: Identify and eliminate excess inventory, which can help improve return on net assets (RONA)
• Increase Uptime: Ensure critical spares are on-site to support production and maintenance
• Identify and Mitigate Risks: Evaluate the risks associated with supporting legacy equipment
• Gain Visibility: Get broader visibility into your plant assets
• Prepare to Modernize: Create a foundation for modernizing with a digital transformation

Asset Management Strategy

As your control system ages, it is important to identify, mitigate, and eliminate the risks associated with part obsolescence on the plant floor. Industrial control and automation products get much more expensive and labor-intensive to maintain as they reach the end of their lifecycle and eventually become obsolete. Another factor you must address is the potential financial consequences associated with downtime from an obsolete critical component failing. Using data collected during an installed base evaluation, you can maintain critical spares to avoid extended downtime and, at the same time, proactively plan to migrate to newer, more available technology.

Gain a Complete Picture with an Installed Base Evaluation

An IBE not only provides you with a complete analysis of all assets installed on the plant floor, but it also includes a thorough evaluation of the entire storeroom. By collecting data in the storeroom, we can analyze critical spare part levels and availability, and we also evaluate and document the condition of the spares sitting on the shelf. Nothing is worse than pulling a critical spare out of the storeroom to find that it has already been used, or it is not functional because it is stored improperly. With the data collected in an installed base evaluation, you can proactively take measures to ensure that you have the right spares for all of your critical components, and you can be confident in the condition of those parts when you need to use them.

Build a Foundation for Modernization

Manufacturing facilities across the globe are currently finding new ways to become more productive and profitable by modernizing traditional manufacturing practices with smart technology. We refer to this transition as a digital transformation. An installed base evaluation can provide essential data to ensure your modernization projects are planned properly to take advantage of machine-to-machine communication and the Internet of Things to drive real results well into the future. I like to think of an IBE as the foundation upon which you can plan the building blocks of a successful digital transformation.

Valuable Reports for Data-Driven Decisions

Installed base evaluations are a crucial and valuable first step to effective asset management. The IBE service comes with several deliverables. We will provide an in-person presentation of all the data collected in the report and an overview of some of the business issues identified. You will receive all the data collected electronically so that you can manipulate it to suit your business needs. The data comes in the form of an executive summary PowerPoint presentation, multiple PDF reports, and, most valuably, many Excel spreadsheets containing all the data.

There is also a lifecycle planning tool that you can add plant-specific information to such as downtime costs and mean time to repair information to generate a more curated report. Once you've had some time to digest and review the information provided, we are committed to being an active partner in helping you reach your business goals and continue to be successful in every step of your plan into the future.

Learn More About IBE

To see a demo of an installed base evaluation or learn more about how it may be able to help you, contact us today.