What's in a name?

Apparently - a lot!

Like me you have probably been reading a lot about Asset Performance Management (APM) and asking yourself what this is and where it came from. Well I have anyway.

When I started out in the mid eighties it was all about maintenance and reliability. Then Moubray either coined  or popularized the term Physical Asset Management. Complete with a heavy dose of attention to the fact that we operated in a managerial discipline. Not just the job of fixing stuff.

By the time I landed in the UK we had progressed through Enterprise Asset Management, which later came to refer to a system and information management issues (strangely enough) and we had arrived firmly on Asset Management.

I have been fine with all of these terms, but I particularly liked the term Asset Management. It was a huge tent under which you could park everything from taking the reading and greasing the bearing - right through to the economics of 5 year CAPEX forecasts and how to use reliability to influence the bond markets.

In one of the larger studies  I was involved in related to Asset Management I was astounded to find out that I was the only person in the room with any physical asset management knowledge - the rest of them were high level economics gurus. (And they seemed like real gurus to me)

Then I started to hear the term Asset Performance Management. From what I understand, and it is my understanding only correct me if I'm wrong, it was coined by the people at Meridium . (The guys who bought you Enterprise Reliability Management System (ERMS))

It seems to have had an almighty impact because the term is now being used everywhere - in the recent Aberdeen report, by Oniqua and Ivara. (Even IBM offers it but in the small print , not embracing the term fully yet)

For the life of me I have not yet worked out whether this is a software solution only, or whether there is a more holistic and global dimension to it.

From what I have seen - I suspect it is a combination of creating marketing distance from competitors (which has worked exceptionally well) and definitely a software based solution. (As EAM evolved into within the administration and efficiency space)

There doesn't yet seem to be too much real detailed focus on long term planning, high confidence decisions impacting on NPV, nor does there seem to be any real tie into optimizing CAPEX. So either it is in evolution still, or it is another narrow slice of the entire Asset Management picture.

Fascinating time to be observing all of this from the outside, I am very curious to see where it all ends up in four to five years time.