Data Management: The key to any successful asset inspection program
Today Enterprises perform hundreds of thousands of asset inspections daily using tools such as drones, mobile, and IoT sensors to capture vast amounts of visual data. Consequently Enterprises are often challenged with how to effectively manage and process all this unstructured data in order to better identify emerging conditions, automate and streamline maintenance and inspection processes and develop the digital models necessary to further optimize business operations.
Intelligently managing this vast amount of geospatial and visual data is quickly becoming an initial problem enterprises experience around asset inspections. Given the critical nature and importance of these assets, the need to ensure quality and safety, and provide timely remediation of asset integrity issues, it is essential to manage this data in a way that is standardized, accurate and enables business insights for a successful inspection program.
Today, many enterprises rely on legacy forms of data storage which can quickly become a hindrance in the management and digital transformation of this data. These hurdles include:
- When faced with the volumes of data for each asset, companies resort to utilizing static folders along with non-standardized naming system, making it difficult for enterprise-wide usage and collaboration
- Massive volumes of unstructured visual data quickly becomes static and non-relational structure becomes unmanageable resulting in wasted insights
- With many users accessing static data, some may find the need to duplicate manually into another folder. The creation of these data silos across an enterprise can quickly lose meaningful intelligence
Because tremendous business intelligence can be derived from this asset inspection data, it is critical for the data to be managed in a way that those insights can be extracted, correlated and analyzed through metadata alongside the visual imagery and videos. This intelligence reveals the dynamic reality of critical assets, infrastructure, and materials assessment. That is, it provides the ability for near-time, visual analysis that can answer the following questions:
- What condition is it in?
- What are its attributes such as location, anomalies and other information?
- What is the relationship to other assets?
- What actions are necessary for this asset?
Answering these questions is at the core of many critical workflows for different industries including risk assessment, asset performance management and enterprise business intelligence systems. However without a unified visual data management solution, many organizations find the process of answering these questions to be labor intensive, expensive and provide little value to other parts of the organization.
The information contained in visual imagery such as images and videos are universal in truth when that information is transformed into a standardized data matrix that is structured and searchable. And once this visual data is managed properly it can yield incredible insights. These benefits include:
- The ability to monitor and benchmark assets throughout their life, not just as individual assets but also across the entire Enterprise asset portfolio.
- Enabling the infusion of AI computer vision and analytics to automatically detect issues, patterns and trends, leading to predictive insights, and remediation.
- The correlation of this data allows Enterprises to bring the field back into the office to empower stakeholders to make better decisions, increasing efficiency and operational agility.
In short, having a unified visual data management platform enables visual data provides a 360 degree visibility into your most pressing asset inspection and maintenance needs. It allows you to transform data chaos into actionable insights, improving safety and efficiency at scale.