Asset integrity and maintenance is of critical importance to ensure continued production and to aid ensuring a safe working environment. It is crucial in managing industrial assets efficaciously to achieve operational excellence, long-term profitability while ensuring reliability, integrity and safety of the assets and the smooth operation of the plant without any failures, leaks, accidents and unplanned shutdowns.

The global asset integrity management services market size is expected to grow from USD 19.4 billion in 2020 to USD 24.2 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 4.5%. But the pandemic has impacted several industries as also the Government was compelled to reduce business activities in response to the virus outbreak. The industries are now slowly resuming operations with the efforts of the government in reviving the economy given the Make in India boost.

However, the plant-wide asset inspection and repair work is on hold and mostly in favour of high-priority production-related assets only. The current COVID-19 strategy of mitigation through working at home and social distancing is resulting in a growing backlog of inspection and maintenance work. Moreover, the situation is forcing asset inspection management services providers to perform critical asset inspections with fewer personnel. The roles of asset management leaders are now no longer the same and are going through a major transition. The digital technologies such as remote inspection and remote collaboration is being adopted to help organizations to maintain safe and productive assets. The manufacturing sector is now poised for a shift in its way of working.

As work has begun to resume slowly, assessment of plant condition, production processes has taken centre stage while ensuring safety of personnel and environment. Supply chain and inventory norms have changed. Adopting agile inspection and maintenance techniques have become most important as plants are under pressure to deliver and maintenance schedules gone haywire. Training & upskilling of maintenance team has become priority today. All this along with the problem of enhancing the life of aging assets necessitates a robust Asset Integrity Management program.

In the light of this '4^th Annual Asset Integrity and Maintenance Summit' will focus on addressing the key issues, challenges and best practices of asset integrity management and maintenance to help professionals effectively manage their assets to deliver value, achieve long term profitability of their organization by balancing risks, costs and performance. This summit will throw light on various techniques, practices and solutions to ensure improved reliability and integrity of new and aging assets and effective methods to mitigate the risk, while also discussing the best practices adopted for asset maintenance in the COVID times.

• The evolving asset integrity framework in the post COVID and digital world- Understanding what changed?
• Establishing a focused digital strategy for better stakeholder alignment and efficient asset management
• RCM to help identification of anomalies and proactive asset management
• Exploring the new techniques in inspections, remote monitoring & NDT
• Managing process safety hazards and reducing high potential incidents with better asset integrity management
• Addressing the demand in shifting mindset & skillsets required for asset integrity management with Industry 4.0