Strategic asset management is now pivotal in delivering industrial profitability and sustainability

Strategic Asset Management involves the management of capital, equipment, people and other resources to minimise risk and to maintain and support all Company assets in a safe, effective and efficient manner while fully complying with Company and Government legislation, without jeopardising the technical integrity of any asset over its life cycle.

A characteristic of many industrial organisations is that facilities management and maintenance improvement is led by engineers and supervisors at specific sites. These individuals target improvements to address local issues using a range of methodologies relevant to their experience. The result is often good short term local improvement; however this is usually not sustained and ultimately the initiatives may fail.

The reason for this is the lack of corporate commitment, and a lack of common alignment between the initiatives and with corporate business objectives. In other words, there is a disconnect between boardroom and shop floor in terms of asset management.

Creating a holistic improvement plan

The solution is to identify the organisation’s asset management challenges and their linkage to the prevailing business objectives. Using this as a reference, a Policy and Strategy for Asset Management can be created. These documents provide a specification of the desired ‘to-be’ situation or ‘vision’.

Finally, a holistic improvement plan can be introduced to create an integrated programme of sustainable improvements which will result in the organisation achieving the vision.

An Asset Management Policy and Strategy standard exists in the form of PAS-55. This standard has been developed principally for infrastructure (eg water and power) and asset-intensive sectors such as oil and gas and was heavily revised in 2008.

Where appropriate, EC Harris Policy and Strategy development is consistent with PAS-55. However, our processes ensure that the results are adapted to meet the business goals of the organisation and are framed in a way to facilitate dissemination and adoption across the organisation.

Achieving sustainable improvement

In order to achieve sustainable benefits, it is essential to take a holistic approach to the improvement programme. Initiatives which focus on single issues such as systems implementation or Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) can produce an initial impact that tends to reduce over time. We find that the most effective improvement programmes typically include:

• Asset Management Policy and Strategy Creation
• Advance Asset Management Benchmarking, Audit and Improvement Planning
• Management and Work Culture Improvement
• CMMS/EAMS Implementation and Optimisation
• Maintenance Strategy Optimisation (Streamlined RCM)
• Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Improvement.

Increase productivity and reduce cost

The benefits delivered through the Strategic Asset Maintenance Improvement Plan are from the outset aligned to the client’s overall business objectives and as such, can be designed to either improve productivity and output from the assets or reduce the cost of operation, or a combination of both. Clients typically achieve a return on investment of six to ten times through the completion of an asset optimisation program. These benefits can accrue from:

• Higher production uptime
• Reduce risk of plant failure through the correct application of maintenance efforts
• Improved operational efficiency
• Improved maintenance productivity (‘wrench time’ improvement)
• Reduced scheduled maintenance effort
• Reduced interruption of delivery schedules
• Reduced equipment life cycle costs through extending equipment life
• Improved energy efficiency
• Reduced parts inventory and spares consumption.

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