Utilities in the throes of digital transformation know that they must bring an increasing variety of data to bear when seeking to innovate for customers.
More recently, this has come to include leverage of advanced asset management information – such as that housed in Enterprise Assert Management systems.
According to a new IDC Marketscape report, this is a cross-industry trend, with transport and retail players looking for enhanced value from asset data, as well as utility firms.
The report claims: “Transportation companies are beginning to use advanced asset management tools and processes to achieve higher customer satisfaction rates for bus riders and commuter rail passengers….In retail, companies are using EAM software tools and processes to monitor and manage environmental and lighting controls, which helps maintain a safe and pleasurable shopping environment. As this shift toward better customer experience takes hold in the market, EAM will continue to grow in importance. In addition, the volume of deals in the market (both public cloud and on-premise) will continue to grow over the next five years.”
But companies seeking to use asset data to effectively influence customer experience will face challenges, IDC warns. Primarily, these barriers to customer-focussed innovation centre around three areas:
- Data management issues: As the number of data sources available to the asset manager continues to grow (sensors, spatial data, visual data, etc.), managing, merging, and analyzing these pools of data at speed will be a tremendous challenge for EAM professionals over the next five years.
- Staffing and development: The function is often under-resourced in terms of staffing, training, and development. This under-resourcing erodes motivation and creates a counterproductive culture among the staff.
- Legacy technology: A lack of technology investment is very apparent in many businesses. Some organizations have yet to move past legacy systems and spreadsheets for critical EAM functions like repair order management, work scheduling, and replace/repair decisions.
To help asset-intensive companies like utilities overcome these challenges with good technology procurement choices, IDC mapped which EAM vendors are most clued up on changing expectations around the use of asset data, and most capable of supporting the shift.
Click here to read the report now