Bentley AssetWise ALIM (Asset Lifecycle Information Management) addresses the information governance problem that emerges when an infrastructure asset — an offshore platform, a power station, a pharmaceutical plant — transitions from capital project delivery into decades of operations and maintenance. During design and construction, thousands of engineering documents, equipment datasheets, 3D models, and vendor manuals are produced by multiple contractors across multiple offices. AssetWise ALIM consolidates this information into a single configuration-controlled environment where every document, tag, and asset record is linked, versioned, and governed by formal change-management workflows — so an operations engineer investigating a pump failure can retrieve not just the maintenance manual but the current P&ID, the pump's installation history, its as-maintained bill of materials, and the 3D model showing its location and connected pipework, all from one query.

How does configuration management work across the asset lifecycle?

AssetWise ALIM applies formal configuration management — the discipline developed in aerospace and defence for managing complex systems — across five domains. Configuration Identification defines the asset breakdown structure and numbering specification, capturing relationships between functional locations, equipment, and serialised items to create baselines against which changes are measured. Management of Change enforces impact analysis before any modification is authorised — a proposed pump replacement triggers a review of connected piping stress, electrical load, and process safety implications before the change is approved. Status Accounting maintains a complete audit trail of every attribute change, so the current state of any asset and its full change history are visible on demand. Requirements Management tracks contractual, regulatory, and operational requirements and links them to the assets and documents that satisfy them — critical for proving compliance during a regulatory audit. Records Management applies retention rules and automated archiving/destruction policies to the document corpus, supporting legal discovery and reducing the data volume that accumulates over a 30-year operating life.

How does digital twin integration extend information access?

AssetWise ALIM connects asset information to visual context through iModel Hub — Bentley's cloud-based platform for federating engineering models, reality meshes, and IoT data into an aligned digital twin. From within the ALIM Web interface, a maintenance planner can launch an immersive 3D view of the facility, click on a physical asset in the model, and retrieve its tag record, maintenance history, and associated documents without knowing the asset number or document ID. This capability — Digital Immersive Operations (DIO) — is configurable via XML mapping files that link ALIM object types to iModel element classes. For greenfield projects, information handover follows the CFIHOS (Capital Facilities Information Handover Specification) RDL standard, validating that commissioning data, operational procedures, and maintenance plans are available at the point of handover. Bidirectional connectors to SAP and Maximo ensure that the asset register and work-order system stay synchronised — an asset created or modified in ALIM propagates to the ERP and CMMS, and a work order raised in Maximo references the controlled engineering data in ALIM rather than an uncontrolled copy.