Maintenance and beyond: the death of “EAM”

In a recent interview by China Plant Engineering magazine (you can read it here), I spoke about the ” death of EAM”… This interview apparently drew a lot of attention. How can software introduced more than 15 years ago, long before even mobile phones and internet connections became common (I distinctly remember a time when I was implementing EAM systems but did not own a personal mobile phone), represent a modern approach to maintenance? Not to mention that the so-called “EAM” is in every single aspect identical to what we have known in industrial circles as “CMMS” for over 30 years.

All this would be laughable if we were not faced, from time to time, with customers who tell us they want EAM, not CMMS. Customers who then end up selecting software packages that I would consider technologically obsolete, and implement them in the same way western companies did 30 years ago. And all this is happening in 2012’s China!

Let’s talk a bit about technology. How many of the “modern” EAM systems implemented in China are even web-based, a technology I clearly remember was introduced by vendors around 1999 and that is supposedly prevalent today? Most are not, they run on PC clients (requiring local installation and maintenance). No amount of IT jargon (from “J2EE” to “SOA”) in sales presentations will ever change that fact. Certainly, old technologies still have a role to play, but don’t come pretend that you are modern! Today some of our Siveco China customers have giant touch-screens, mobile devices with RFID scanning capability (for equipment tags) and iPad solutions for managers… All running on the Internet, with devices connecting on the 3G network. This is not lab technology, for demonstration only: large companies are actually running business-critical operations using our systems across hundreds of sites, thousands of web users, hundreds of them using mobile apps! That’s 2012 technology! Yes, EAM is dead, from a technological point of view.

Let’s talk about functionality now, since the entire EAM vs. CMMS debate is based on the idea that EAM has more functionality, hence the term “enterprise”. I challenge any of our readers to give me one single EAM functionality that would be missing in a CMMS! Whoever does, wins an iPad, loaded with our latest app! There is none. Why is that? Simple: EAM and CMMS are one and the same thing (read this article about terminology)! The term EAM was a marketing trick, just like in the late 90s, at the top of the ebusiness bubble, some companies started to talk about eEAM… When the bubble burst, red-faced IT marketers quickly dropped the e! I lived through those times, boy did we have fun! Anyway, my point is, EAM does exactly the same thing as CMMS, these are just two words for the same exact thing.

I know what some of those EAM people are going to say: the functionality may be the same, but the concept is different! It’s “enterprise level”, whatever that means. So let’s look at the concept then: an admin-centric approach, focused on time and cost control, with heavy approval processes! A lot of paper to print! A secretary or two to input data on behalf of the engineers and to compile reports for the boss! What a concept! Look instead at what our customers are implementing today in China: risk management solutions that allow them to identify the top risk areas, to define actions plans and to ensure their execution – thanks to mobility solutions anyone in the organization can use, from the big boss (on his tablet) to the technician (on smartphone). No paper, no secretary, no absurd focus on time and cost (very seldom at the top of the agenda in China) but instead on operational risks. EAM, as a concept, is dead.

How dare this small company tell us that EAM is dead? After all, giant IT companies are behind EAM (to be historically accurate, large diversified IT companies acquired semi-bankrupt EAM suppliers in the mid-2000s – suppliers that had greatly suffered from the misguided ebusiness strategies I described above). How can those IT giants be wrong? The truth is that most of the companies operating in this market segment have stopped, or almost stopped, investing in EAM years ago. If customers were to do a little investigation, beyond simply looking at how big those companies are (do you really think they earn billions of dollars with EAM?), they would know. Another verifiable fact: those companies have not had a successful implementation in China for years! Projects sold as 6-month implementations end up taking several years (thanks to the great Service Oriented Architecture perhaps)! Systems that costed millions of RMB and are used only by a few secretaries to carry out administrative tasks (“our system is just a big fax machine” as one client put it). That’s the advantage of being larger than your clients, you can blame them for failure (“your team was not mature enough for our great system”) and they happily come back to you with more money. I am ok with that, I won’t fight windmills… But don’t tell me EAM is superior. This model is dead, as far as results are concerned!

You can continue to live in an imaginary world where “EAM” is modern but what you get is technology from the early 2000s to support concepts invented in the 1980s, which takes several years to implement… Or you can come join us in the reality of today’s China – where real customers already use, on a very large scale, cloud computing, mobile solutions, to support risk management of large complex assets, in a quickly evolving business environment, subject to tightening regulations. Customers that implement such tools to reshape their operations in a matter of months rather than years, across hundreds of sites, with thousands of users on web, tablets, mobile devices… without any paper, without any “secretary” to interface with the system. Customers that measure ROI from their projects, often obtained in less than a year. Welcome to the real world! Welcome to Siveco!

In this month’s newsletter, a Reliability piece on Risk Prevention, the Customer Story of PVC maker Hanwha Chemical, a Partner article about our 2012 “Maintenance in China” Survey, Tips & Tricks on bluebee® and the usual Latest News!

Bruno Lhopiteau
General Manager
Siveco China

Tags： CMMS、EAM