01 Strategy & Planning

Reliability keeps things going, Asset management delivers value with managed risksPEMAC Now Magazine Fall 2019

“In asset investment planning, research suggests the difference between best practice and what most organizations have is somewhere between 8–20% in value.” 

We’re currently rolling out an Asset Integrity Management System (AIMS) across our terminal network, which consists of nine terminals across Canada and the U.S. We’re publishing 27 new standards as part of this initiative that cover a variety of topics such as risk assessment, inspection planning, recordkeeping, data management, and relevant codes, standards, and regulations. This presentation will focus on the training and rollout of this program and will highlight some of the lessons learned. Some of the challenges include providing training to a group that spans a large geographical area, having a wide variety of stakeholders who require different levels of knowledge about the program (operations, project management, document control, contractors, management), and ensuring training is effective and leads to a smooth adoption of the changes that come with the new standards. Some of the topics we’ll cover include using the ADKAR model of change management to evaluate how effective your training will be; awareness of the need to change; desire to support and participate in the change; knowledge of how to change; ability to implement required skills and behaviours; reinforcement to sustain the change; tailoring presentations to specific groups; creating short and long versions of modules—building blocks for presentations; tailoring presentations to each group based on required knowledge; having a one-hour “crash course” presentation to give a quick overview to certain groups (upper management, those not directly impacted by standards); giving several opportunities for questions to ensure any potential issues are identified early (standard review, training, pre-publishing); and some tips on encouraging engagement: examples and exercises (real world), visual aids (flowcharts, photos, graphics over text), handouts (quick reference guide, poster, contact sheet, acronym list), and summaries (standard review sheets, single-page overviews).

Around the turn of the 21st century, municipalities began using the term asset management (AM) to refer to a broad range of processes that span the continuum, from managing short-term asset maintenance to long-term asset investment planning. Over the last two decades, AM has been accepted as an umbrella term that refers to the processes that work together to answer the following: When, why, and how should we spend money on infrastructure assets to ensure they meet evolving societal expectations? But the traditional approaches to developing AM processes—extremely granular asset inventories, age-based spending need forecast models, complex level of service metrics—have frustrated organizations, cost them millions, and not practically helped to answer this fundamental question. In recent years, a number of AM champions have developed a consumer-based approach to realize value from assets in the achievement of societal objectives. Clear processes create an asset expenditure to asset performance relationship that helps set overall spending levels and enables a living management system that’s used to develop dynamic prioritized short-term spending plans. This approach enables organizations to engage with their customers/clients to balance asset performance (level of service) expectations with financial affordability. This Asset Stewardship Quality Management System resets the AM paradigm by bringing clarity to what AM processes should do and how enablers (data, people, technology) can help. The tangible impacts resulting from the new AM paradigm include a reduction in the granularity of asset registers, improved accuracy of measuring asset performance and tracking asset spending, and confident spending need forecasts to ensure infrastructure systems can effectively underwrite desired societal progress. These tangible impacts are realized through addressing all three enablers: improving data management and data collection activities, providing a training program to staff, and leveraging innovations in hardware and software technologies.

Organizations have a performance metric for productivity measured as cost per unit produced, or sometimes called unit cost or cost of service. In operations, we recognize we can affect the numerator with how well we manage our costs, and we can affect the denominator with how much we can produce. What is Super-Productivity? We define Super-Productivity as the sum of all the bad over the sum of all the good. As a leader, if you really want agency over all your organization’s activities and you desire operationally excellent results, then you must reflect all the opportunity costs your organization has been blind to in the measure of productivity. Is your organization courageous enough to see yourself in that light? Few are. Here’s what it takes. Join Paul Daoust as we challenge our perceptions on the fascinating relationship between cost, performance and risk. Together we will apply these concepts to asset-intensive organizations to enable more, better decisions, vastly improved business plans and higher value business outcomes from the same assets with fewer resources.

Over the last year, PEMAC has been actively contributing to the development of a Global Certification Scheme (GCS) in asset management through our involvement with the World Partners in Asset Management (WPiAM). Individuals will be able to use this scheme to guide their individual career progression while organizations can use it to set expectations for the knowledge, skills, application, and proficiency levels of these competencies for AM roles. This presentation will introduce the WPiAM’s Global Credentials Scheme to our PEMAC members. It is on track for roll-out later in 2020.

Studies have shown that asset performance is negatively impacted by the lack of an integrated operational readiness approach during the asset acquisition phase (or project). The resulting delays in reaching sustainable operating performance and anticipated service levels impact start-up dates, capital costs, operational revenues, lifecycle costs, customer satisfaction, organizational morale, and overall project NPV. These impacts often require large additional cost and labour injections to correct for the lack of an integrated operational readiness approach. There are a number of operational readiness asset management objectives to be focused on in parallel with the execution of a project—a must to enable any new asset, facility, or venture to meet business lifecycle targets. These prime focuses can be summarized as follows: develop capable people to safely operate, maintain, and support the project outcomes; ensure asset capability is developed and maintained in line with business requirements; implement and configure required supporting systems and business process; seamlessly manage the transition from project to operations; and ensure the engagement and alignment of the organization and all business stakeholders. This presentation will look at a number of mining, manufacturing, and public infrastructure case studies and show the benefits of using a structured approach to operational readiness during the acquisition phase of the asset lifecycle.

The Organization-Wide Physical Asset Management (OWPAM) Approach is an interactive session to explore the asset management landscape and to help asset management practitioners and organizations on their path to implementing an organization-wide physical asset management system. Ask anyone in your organization individually and you’ll hear that each is doing a great job. However, when you bring all those individuals together and ask the same question again, you’ll most likely get a different answer. Traditionally, physical asset management systems have always been silo-based in organizations. The effects of those silos have significant implications creating gaps and overlaps in business processes and impeding the decision-making process. Managing physical assets by nature is a co-operative and cross-functional discipline to realize maximum value. What really creates value in physical asset management systems is the holistic approach, which is that every organization exists to provide value as a whole, through better co-ordination, collaboration, and alignment across functional areas. This OWPAM Approach session looks at the key physical asset lifecycle strategic and tactical activities involved in an organization-wide physical asset management system and prioritizes them to develop an implementation plan. Participants will interact with one another to understand the whole spectrum of strategic and tactical activities required for a holistic and organization-wide physical asset management approach; discuss physical asset management activities, how they apply to their organizational context, and how important they are from a whole lifecycle delivery perspective; identify ownership issues, gaps, and overlaps that could exist and that are critical for the successful implementation of physical asset management; and generate discussions around the implementation plan and priorities to meet organizational objectives and enable realization of maximum value.

Asset management (AM) is a far-ranging topic and can be very confusing or overwhelming to anyone who is now embarking on a program or trying to take their existing program up a notch. The biggest impact in AM is on the planning side of the AM Framework. Essentially, if you plan well, then you can execute the right activities (capital project, operations, and maintenance tasks) well. Conversely, which is the case with many organizations, there is poor planning but with efficient execution of the work and attendant sub-optimal performance. Excellence in AM requires effective planning in three areas: Growth and Rationalization, Renewal & Replacement, and Operations & Maintenance. This presentation will provide best-in-class concepts for developing these three areas and the return on investment in effective planning, and will be supported by real-life examples.   Originally presented at MainTrain 2020