“Ivara users and prospects will benefit in particular because Bentley’s unmatched global coverage and resources include access to in-country experts to facilitate worldwide implementation of our unique APM solutions. Finally, Bentley’s broad reach to owners across all domains of infrastructure can now bring the best practices of APM from owner-operators of the largest and most mission-critical plants to all types of infrastructure assets of every scale, for new levels of operational excellence.”

Andy Chatha, president and CEO, ARC Advisory Group, said, “In today’s increasingly competitive landscape, owner-operators are faced with a number of complex challenges. Chief among them are improving performance and reducing costs while preserving the environment and plant safety under constrained financial and human resources. Bentley’s acquisition of Ivara is a very positive step towards enhancing owner-operators’ returns on their investments and further incentivizing them to make additional investments in infrastructure to help sustain long-term economic growth around the world.”

Paula Hollywood, senior analyst, ARC Advisory Group, said, “Asset performance management has many dimensions including proactive maintenance, risk mitigation, environmental, health and safety concerns, and reliability. Achieving these goals requires a collaborative information exchange in order to manage critical issues and constraints while simultaneously improving asset availability and utilization. To be effective, they need an asset information management system that can deliver complete, accurate, timely, and most importantly actionable information for all APM stakeholders, internal or external to the organization. The acquisition of Ivara, a leading APM vendor, by Bentley Systems demonstrates that Bentley fully understands the challenges facing the infrastructure community at large. Moreover, it uniquely positions Bentley to deliver solutions that enable owners of capital-intensive assets to design reliability into systems.”

Redefining APM: Representative Opportunities

Among many application areas that will be catalyzed by information mobility spanning engineering and operations/maintenance, initial priorities for AssetWise APM software development include:

• (beyond inspection): “interactive inspection” – to revolutionize labor and information productivity in this essential activity, where to date IT hasn’t progressed much beyond capturing in “blobs” the same unsearchable text that static paper workflows required, resulting in the same wasteful “information mortality.” Rather, each interactive inspection assignment can and should be APM-guided to efficiently identify salient and structured observations specific to the location, recent and historical conditions, knowledge of failure modes, and risk assessment of each unique instance of equipment and structure. Interactive inspection will increasingly take advantage of immersive information mobility technologies combining, as appropriate, smart mobile devices; dynamic forms; as-maintained 3D “hypermodels” to navigate via interactive callouts in context for design and construction drawings, specifications and maintenance instructions, safety animations, and more; and convenient capture of 3D point-cloud imagery for trend differencing. Intrinsic “hands-on” positioning and authentication technologies will assure efficient routing and safe access, confirm accurate tag and location identification, and dynamically index inspection observations to the correct asset lifecycle information records – for compliance reporting and configuration management.
• (beyond asset health monitoring): “health modeling” – to enable design engineers to participate in prescribing and interpreting the otherwise often overwhelming extent of “real-time” asset health monitoring data streams. To dramatically expand upon a current Ivara EXP use case of vulnerable process piping configurations – where corrosion and wear unpredictably change not only flow characteristics but also structural strength – the pipe stress analysis from design can, to start with, be used by engineers to recommend the most effective sensor locations. Then the resulting regularly sampled observations – of, for example, sectional deflections and strains – can be compared within the design engineers’ pipe stress analysis model to “inversely” solve for the re-calibrated as-operated (deteriorated) structural parameters of each pipe section. Finally, the design engineers can regularly re-analyze the as-calibrated parameters, again reusing their design model, to assure that safety margins are never compromised.

What Users and Industry Experts Are Saying

Marius Basson, vice president, Global Reliability Services, CH2M HILL, said, “As a reliability practitioner, my goal is to optimize performance of assets and mitigate the risk of consequence of failure. To be able to instantly trace back to a failure mode in Ivara EXP and further back to the design in Bentley’s information modeling software means I can make fast and accurate decisions that affect the bottom line – and I will have the data I need for regulatory compliance to demonstrate we are doing all the right things.”

Gino Palarchio, general manager, Manufacturing Services, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, said, “I am pleased to see that Ivara EXP asset performance management is now part of the Bentley Systems software portfolio. With the acquisition of Ivara, Bentley can ensure continued innovation of critical software systems we use to manage important assets throughout the entire lifecycle, helping us ensure our sustainability.”