The hole in world class asset management

Over the years there have been some fantastic claims about what is and what is not world class maintenance, or world class asset management.

It has been the base of books, standards, benchmarking studies and a range of other information sharing tools and products. Yet nobody has yet come up with anything that truly defines what World Class is in either maintenance or asset management.

It remains a tool used by consultants to very effectively separate clients and their money. Until now...

The latest in this line of products and methods to claim ascendancy is the much-spoken-about publicly available specification published by British Standards, and created with the sponsorship of the Institute of asset management within the UK, PAS-55.

There is much that could be said about this document, but on the whole it holds together relatively well. However, like other documents of its type, (The common framework by UKWIR on the capital planning approach within the UK water industry), there is one glaring omission.

Asset management is not separate from maintenance management, quite to the contrary, asset management is the larger picture under which maintenance sits.

For too long now it has been seen as a capital planning exercise, or part of managing replacement periods, or program management and a range of other areas.

What has been missed is that any decisions regarding the replacement of assets or other end-of-life decisions, are fuelled greatly by the information that is generated within the field of maintenance.

Therefore a focus on items such as RCM, not merely on defining the important failures or equipment, a focus on operational resource planning, (not merely "make a plan") and a focus on the intensive discipline of just-in-case inventory management are all areas where documents such as these fall down.

And it could be argued that many of the areas that they do cover are tackled most efficiently through proactive action in the sphere of maintenance, not as isolated entities in themselves.

As we progress further and further away from the mass labor reductions of the 90's, those industries that are able to make leaps forward in their asset management are the ones that will do so using a truly holistic approach. That is, a cradle to grave approach that includes the vital element of in service life cycle management, or modern maintenance.

Cheers,

Daryl...