Global digital asset management market anticipated to reach $8.5 billion by 2025

In 2019, the global digital asset management market reached a value of $3.4 billion—with the market anticipated to reach $8.5 billion by 2025. ⁽¹⁾ This growth is caused by two major factors: the emerging trend of digitization and the increasing adoption of cloud-based services. Considering COVID-19’s transformation of seemingly every aspect of life, having an established document and information asset management strategy is imperative for businesses in maintaining operations for both the now and the future.

“In the last 25 years, information and document management solutions have vastly improved to where we are today,” says Jessica Bianchessi, Vice President of Customer Success of engineering and information management firm Kinsmen Group. “A robust, auditable and fully connected set of solutions is essential to maximize reliability, maintain safety, and be ready to adapt to change.”

According to Bianchessi, companies turn to what she notes as the “Best Documented Asset” strategy to solve many problems, such as failed compliance audits, increased safety risks and inefficiencies due to missing or inaccurate drawings and procedures, a specific event that drives the desire for change—the latter of which has been particularly pertinent amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic.

With millions of Americans currently working from home, some estimates show that over 75% of human resources executives expect this to continue beyond COVID-19. ⁽²⁾

On top of changes reflected in the workforce, nearly 1.2 billion children have been affected worldwide by school closures caused by the pandemic—with UNICEF pointing out that a lack of access to such tools and technology risks further damaging the global learning crisis. ⁽³⁾

“COVID-19 has changed many things for all of us, especially when it comes to making remote access to shared information much more critical,” Bianchessi says. The world’s newfound heightened reliance on technology and thus critical document and information management amidst the ongoing pandemic directly correlate to a “compound effect on the supply chain and the economy,” and one where “improperly managing documents in the manufacturing industry can have severe consequences—from a halt in production to a safety incident or the death of an employee,” according to a recent article featuring Kinsmen Group’s CEO, Brian Sallade—with Sallade highlighting specifically the near closing of the meat industry. ⁽⁴⁾

Document and asset information management solutions prove to be critical for organizing and maintaining company information and resources—especially with 46% of employees noting that finding the documents they need is “challenging and time-consuming.”⁽⁵⁾ Bianchessi says that document and asset information management systems tend to fail for an array of reasons, including:

The systems are poorly implemented, connected and maintained
Multiple, disconnected systems are departmentally installed across the organization
End-users don’t properly adapt to using the system
Not all critical engineering drawings are available in digital format
Not all systems support concurrent engineering, which makes it even harder to find the latest revision
Asset tags, drawings, and documents are not linked properly
The organization is not ready for change
Technology evolves

“There are so many different challenges from many different perspectives,” Bianchessi says. “For a given type, category, or piece of equipment, a specific set of documentation must be available to meet the needs of stakeholders.”

When it comes to tackling issues associated with document management systems and providing improved solutions, Kinsmen Group suggests taking the “Best Documented Asset” (BDA) approach. As a complete strategy geared towards asset-intensive industries, BDA targets the specific use cases for owner-operators of large assets by bringing together leading technologies, applications, processes, people, and tools to deliver a more integrated but tailored set of solutions. BDA also aims to assist companies by filling in any “gaps” between existing systems and presenting a simplified solution for a process that can typically be overly complex.

“BDA doesn’t try to be what it is not, but rather remains focused on the specific requirements, needs, and results that an operating facility achieves when it has every asset within the facility 100% documented to company standards,” Bianchessi says. “This is the future.”

About Kinsmen Group
Kinsmen Group is an award-winning team of engineering information management specialists with a passion for applying innovation to prominent oil, gas, pharmaceutical, and utility companies. Their organization strives to deliver superior business results through excellence and pragmatism each time they partner with any business, revolutionizing each with wiser decision-making, risk reduction, safety improvement, and higher returns on their investments. Kinsmen Group is ranked as the “Best of the Best Professional Service Organizations” by Service Performance Insight Research and among the “Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America” by Inc. Magazine. To learn more, visit www.kinsmengroup.com.