Particle Physics, EAM and What They Mean to Your Industrial Business
What can any industrial-sector business learn from the 25-year partnership between CERN and Infor EAM asset management software?
Even though CERN, the largest particle research laboratory in the world, utilizes the most complex technology known to man, its approach to enterprise asset management is as simple as it is enlightening.
What can any industrial-sector business learn from the 25-year partnership between CERN and Infor EAM asset management software?
Reliability matters most, no matter what you do
Use CERN's crown jewel, the Large Hadron Collider, as an example. It's a 17-mile-long particle accelerator containing an estimated 100 million high-tech components that work in unison to propel matter to nearly the speed of light and recreate conditions immediately following the Big Bang.
Or look at the LHC in another way: It's a large-scale asset with an $8 billion price tag that thousands of people rely on to do their jobs and provide a much-needed service – the advancement of particle physics.
Atom-smashing or not, lost uptime is a direct loss to your mission, your investment of capital in that mission and those who depend on asset functionality.
Always build a communal knowledge base
About 1,100 users regularly access CERN's asset management system, which collects 100 terabytes of physics data every day. Some are scientists and engineers. Others are contractors and administrators.
But regardless of their role, everyone must understand and utilize EAM software with equal prowess. With an annual work order queue of 150,000 and 4,500 preventive maintenance schedules to consider, the risk of confusion or miscommunication is high.
Training users and selecting the right software can eliminate complexity. In fact, CERN barely modified Infor EAM upon adopting it, a credit to the intuitive design of the software.
Never forget to prioritize prioritization
Of all the assets CERN manages, it deems 1.8 million critical. This includes supra-conducting magnets, radiation monitoring equipment and cryogenics, but also technical infrastructure, such as tunnels, cooling and ventilation systems and car parks.
Most of the time, a road to one of CERN's 700 above-ground buildings might not be as important as the technology inside those buildings or underground, but who knows? Under the right circumstances, it could be. But will CERN know when that moment comes?
Asset criticality isn't a static force. It shifts according to any number of external factors or internal demands. Combined with CERN's existing IIoT technology, Infor EAM helps users determine which assets are critical and when, articulating all that hard technical data into actionable intelligence.
CERN is proof that total enterprise asset management can accomplish great things. For more information on how CERN uses Infor EAM to make discoveries that change our knowledge of the universe every day, check out the video below.