Version 3.4 of Meridium’s Asset Performance Management software launched at Meridium Conference 2010

4/15/2010

St. Petersburg, FL – Meridium, the global leader in asset performance management (APM) software and consulting solutions, launched version 3.4 of its innovative Asset Performance Management software today at the company’s annual meeting, Meridium Conference 2010 in St. Petersburg, FL.

In today’s keynote presentation, Joe Nichols, Meridium Vice President, Product Strategy, highlighted some of the key product enhancements of this latest release, as well as new modules and functionality, including:

• Production Loss Accounting - Measuring production capacity in a standardized way allows plant owners and operators to decrease production losses, eliminate unclassified losses, take action to improve production, and compare production data across the enterprise. Meridium Production Loss Accounting (PLA) meets this need as a tool to manage production goals, collect actual production values, track production events and impacts, and reconcile production targets. With robust analysis, reporting and integration capabilities, PLA helps users visualize production losses and their impacts, making PLA the ideal solution for accurately measuring, analyzing, and communicating production performance.
• Asset Strategy Optimization - Meridium Asset Strategy Optimization (ASO) extends the qualitative risk/cost analytical capabilities of Meridium’s Asset Strategy Management module through advanced, quantitative strategy modeling and simulation for assets and systems, resulting in optimized availability and reliability. Meridium ASO optimization routines can help analysts determine the best approach to performing maintenance, inspection or redesign activities. Using ASO, analysts can simulate failure models and asset strategies for multiple scenarios in order to identify the most optimum asset performance management policies.
• Asset Criticality Analysis - Meridium Asset Criticality Analysis (ACA) provides a standard approach for assessing the criticality of systems, functional locations and equipment, leveraging Meridium's configurable risk matrix as the tool for determining criticality. Meridium ACA can import systems, functional locations and equipment from Meridium's Hazards Analysis application, ensuring that risks align with the criticality analysis. These results can also be used to initiate an asset strategy which may be imported to Meridium’s Asset Strategy Management module.

“One of Meridium’s strengths is the ability to tightly integrate our applications so that the value of one module can be leveraged and further enhanced by another,” Nichols said.  “With version 3.4, we’ve further capitalized on this strength by providing new functionality that extends the value chain of current applications with completely new business processes to provide the total view of asset performance and optimization of asset strategies.”

Yesterday’s keynote speaker for Meridium Conference 2010 was Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes magazine, who spoke on ”Innovation: Essential to Thriving in a Crisis Market.” Other sessions at Meridium Conference 2010 also highlighted the strategic partnership between Meridium and Emerson Process Management with presentations from Emerson’s Craig Llewellyn, President, Asset Optimization Business, and Augie DiGiovanni, Vice President, PlantWeb Services. Donald Schubert, Senior Vice President at Marsh Inc., the world's leading risk and insurance services firm, spoke on the power of Meridium to help companies reduce their risk profiles.

In addition to the wealth of partner and industry-expert speakers, some of the many Meridium client case studies included sessions from The Dow Chemical Company, MeadWestvaco, Marathon Oil, Sahara Petrochemicals, Eastman Chemical, Xcel Energy, Flint Hills Resources, and P&H Mining Equipment.

“This year’s conference is a prime example of our strong commitment to our clients, our partners and the industries we serve,” said Bonz Hart, Meridium President and CEO, in his opening remarks at the conference.  “Our clear and compelling goal is to help our customers protect their people and the environment by providing technology, best practices and consulting services that improve safety and compliance, as well as bottom line profitability.”