Asset Condition Assessment for Infrastructure and Utilities industries

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on an article and case study focusing on Asset Condition Assessment for the utility and infrastructure industries.

ACA programs are part of the renewals planning for these industries, and therefore part of the Capital maintenance forecasts they develop. 

When done well these programs can inform renewals spending with confidence for up to 5 years, when done poorly the organisation often finds itself at the mercy of current events with no confident view of replacements and refurbishments. 

In work from 2005 to today it is my opinion that the majority of programs of this nature are misdirected, and often spend large sums of money on information that is misleading or totally useless. 
Capital maintenance spending covers that portion of capital allocated to asset renewals. These could be based on condition and forecasting where the assets are eligible to be managed in this fashion, or they could be straight out time based replacements or restorations. 

While I think there is a lot of room for movement in the area of time based replacements, and we continue to research these areas, my attention is drawn to the element of this forecast via the Asset Condition Assessment program. 

ACA programs are fundamentally predictive maintenance tasks (PTIVE). That is, they are inspections to detect signs of the onset of failure or that an asset is in the process of failing, and then using this information to forecast remnant life.

This is where I have found these programs to fall over. They either;

• do not have inspections to detect potential failures with quantifiable links to remnant life, or

• are focussed on "expected condition" with only a tenuous connection to remnant life, or

• are totally subjective and based on the inspectors experience and judgement with little to no guidelines for potential failure identification.

PTIVE as ACA Tasks

RCM recognises that PTIVE tasks can be applied both to random failure types, as well as time based failures. 

Within the utility and infrastructure sectors the majority of ACA initiatives are for life based failures. 

In this instance the calculations, approaches and techniques are different. Life based failure is more or less linear, and often with increased wear towards the end of life. 

If the ACA program is going to contribute to the renewals forecasts effectively, then the following factors are essential to consider.

• First, an understanding of life, and of the failure modes that are likely to cause the end of life failures. 

• Second, identification of a potential failure condition along the lifecycle that is able to be linked to remnant life.

• Third, an understanding of the Probability of Detection of the inspection to assist in determining the inspection frequency.

• Fourth, a detailed inspection instruction with clear statements of what the inspector is looking to detect and what this means.

The principles of RCM have been useful for myself and our consultants in developing ACA programs for utility companies globally, and when combined with hard time maintenance techniques they help to create high confidence renewals forecasts.

While this practice is restricted to utility and infrastructure sectors due to their economic models, they are dramatically under-utilized other asset intensive industries.