02 Asset Management Decision Making

Sustainability is an important objective these days, and many organizations are working to develop and implement policies that consider the long-term impact of their operations. Given its focus on “whole-of-life”, Asset Management has an important role to play in efforts to continuously improve sustainability efforts

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.

How does your organization differentiate between asset management, and maintenance and reliability?

This article will be discussing the issues and some causes of bad parts.

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.

Not all asset information is equal. Asset owning organizations benefit from having the right information at the right time. Asset knowledge primacy, an imperative to deliver operational excellence throughout the asset lifecycle. What is asset knowledge primacy? As the asset is developed and matures, stakeholders must calibrate data collection and exchange while curating fit-for-purpose asset information. Consistent thought-in-action leads to precision timing, relevance, and accuracy of information delivery. Successful asset knowledge capture is rarely accomplished efficiently or effectively. This doesn’t have to be so. In this presentation Chris Murphy will share an approach to provide asynchronous asset information delivery to best serve the life of the asset and support the organization to deliver value from the assets.

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.

Maintenance of critical assets and life safety infrastructures is extremely important. Therefore, significant precautions and risk analysis should be given to the potential effects of human errors during preventive and corrective maintenance, including bypass requirements, deactivation of system, and the expected impact of the failure on the program operation. Unanticipated or unplanned downtime is costly, negatively impacts building operation, and often impacts an organization’s reputation and brand. For planned activities (preventive or corrective), it’s important to proactively document the scope of work and identify potential problems that could occur so that risks are managed and all stakeholders are aware of them. This presentation contains a real-life application that will provide the basis to improve the future of your maintenance organization and prevent future downtime. The permit-to-work process is a real-world best practice to help improve communications, manage risk in your organization, keep your critical infrastructure running, and minimize productivity loss or damage due to unplanned downtime. We’ll provide an overview of the permit-to-work procedure and its associated risk assessment and mitigation protocol. There are seven learning objectives: evaluating maintenance performance; reducing or eliminating human errors; improving stakeholders’ engagement; enhancing interdepartmental communications; focusing on culture change by leveraging risk management tools; enhancing critical equipment reliability by reducing potential downtime; building a staff-vendor-client relationship by implementing clear expectations; and protecting your critical assets and reputation by minimizing unplanned downtime.

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.