Enterprise Asset Management in 2022: Meeting the Data Management Challenge

As organizations grow, it becomes increasingly important for them to effectively manage the lifecycle of their physical assets.

Enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions can assist businesses in monitoring and controlling the health of all the building systems and equipment they rely on to support their operations. The growth of this segment underscores its importance. By 2022, IDC forecasts that the worldwide market for EAM applications will reach $2.5 billion, while Markets and Markets expects even more significant growth, to $6.05 billion according to "Worldwide Enterprise Asset Management Applications Forecast, 2018–2022: EAM and Its Emerging Role in Customer Service".

One of the challenges that companies face as they adopt an EAM solution is managing the wide variety of data sources related to their assets. IDC notes, “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 test for EAM professionals over the next five years.”

With more than 20 years of providing software solutions for managing physical assets, Accruent has experienced this explosion in data alongside its customers. Accruent software is used to manage over 5.3 trillion square feet of facilities and 7.3 billion assets. Because of the need to illustrate asset health with data from across the enterprise, Accruent launched a business intelligence platform, Accruent Analytics. This platform enables organizations to:

• Bring together data from multiple sources.
• Deliver the insights needed.
• Manage physical assets and related business processes optimally.

Accruent Analytics leverages an infrastructure that includes Oracle Cloud for storing, transforming and quickly accessing a huge quantity of data, together with a Cognos business intelligence platform to enable drag-and-drop reporting and visualizations. Utilizing cloud resources to store and transform a wealth of data and deliver near real-time information to the business intelligence engine, the solution enables rich visualizations of the condition and performance of asset portfolios. In fact, the solution is so unique that Accruent was awarded the Oracle Cloud Platform Innovation Award for the Accruent Analytics platform. The award recognizes the ability of the platform to scale and move a vast amount of data from their sources into data warehouses, ultimately delivering near real-time dashboards and reports that customers rely on to run their businesses.

Taking a closer look at how the solution is architected, Accruent Analytics uses Oracle tools to pull data from multiple product Accruent product databases (including SQL Server and Oracle databases) in our hosting centers into a central data lake in Oracle Cloud. From there, the data flows into product-specific data warehouses that can be enriched with data from other products to facilitate cross-product reporting. Some of the data coming into each warehouse can be transformed for easier consumption by reports. The report models in Cognos are based on data coming from these warehouses.