Straight to the point according to my own experiences… Debate and new ideas are more than welcome! ·

The main thing

Main thing in Asset Management initiatives is about rewiring brains and behaviors in the organization on what “asset” means in terms of business value, and how each of us affect such asset capacity to produce (or keep) business value.

You can’t cheat

Whatever you enjoyed or struggled with, in your Quality Assurance Management System (QMS) will be a joy, or a struggle, for your asset management initiative. At the end, what you are going to deliver in the short term is, in fact, a management system.

*yelling* This… is… Assetmanagemeeent!

Why that strange (misleading, and annoyingly dominant) “equivalence” between maintenance and asset management? The value an asset is enabled to produce, is much more tightly coupled to the project that created the asset, than to the limited options you may play during the late O&M phase. Wake up project guys, asset management initiatives are more for you than for the maintenance guys. And dear maintenance people, please mind when using the words “asset management”. A clue is the tuple “value-life cycle”. Monitoring equipment, work orders, scheduling KPIs that’s all maintenance! Only when connecting stuff to assure value throughout all the life cycle and across all the organization, we are actually talking about asset management.

Not touching contracts means doing not that much

The important scenes in the lifetime of an asset are related to the way you prepare and execute your contracts. If your asset management initiative is not touching the way you buy or hire, there’s a huge hole somewhere. Design, Engineering and all topics related on how an assets gets its shape defined and built, has a tremendous impact on the ability of this asset to deliver value. You won’t conquer new value with old contracting practices based on the denial of inherent uncertainty associated to the development of an asset.

Life Cycle Everything

Having management and performance assessment silos are a great way to divide and destroy your own organization. Becoming more aware of life cycle cost, of course is a must for asset management, but the are several other life cycle stuffs that need to be glued across the organization so we stop acting in “my part” or “your part” as we all cooperate (or forget to cooperate) to optimize the Life Cycle deliverables (cost, value, risk…).

Don’t mix

Asset management initiatives contain actions related to the creation of an asset-related value analysis and assurance capacity. That is… the Asset Management System. So, if you’re going to full the schedule of your asset management initiative pretending to put your hands directly in every asset related problem…¿What are you creating the asset management system for? Remember the ideas is you are creating a “sustained and sustainable capacity” to address every possible value erosion associated to the assets, not hurrying to solve yourself some urgent stuff while forget the rest.

Mind the value first! ISO 55000 is good, not god

Times where you came back home with the happy face your teacher put in your homework have long passed. Real asset management certification is more business value out of you assets! Don’t be overconfident with ISO 55000. Such standard states our current “common agreement” on what  the borders of asset management are, how an asset management system should perform, or what are the emphasis to follow, but that’s perhaps 30% or 40% of the real thing (Don’t just believe me, or hate me, please compare the first and the current version of ISO 9000 and check how alike they are). Current version of ISO 55000 is, let’s say, the skeleton of a complete asset management capacity, so be prepared to find the guts and muscles associated with that skeleton somewhere else, as there are tons of things associated to asset management under debate in the ISO TC 251 that haven’t seen the light of the agreement.

Don’t reinvent the wheel

Asset management initiatives are more about connecting and harmonizing things than about creating them out of the absolute nothingness . Be smart and do a proper survey on whatever is in place related to your assets before daring to propose to create new stuff. Certainly new thing will be required, but won’t be the biggest part.

Mind your technical ecosystem

Deploying an asset management system into a “technology consumer” economy (i.e. developing country) is plane different that deploying such capacity in a “technology producing” country, so keep that in mind. The complexity that technology buying economies are willing to accept to manage their assets, are far lower than the complexity that technology producing economies are used to manage.

Talk loud

Getting a concept into a person’s mind may be a challenging task, now imagine how complex could be putting new “value” or “asset” concepts into hundreds or thousands of minds, up to the point those minds effectively alter their behavior. No one will move nowhere if your communication is weak,  non creative, non pervasive and or intensive enough.

Thanks for your reading. Happy to [thrive_2step id=’749′]read your ideas[/thrive_2step] .

Be good and keep alive!

—Jorge