One of the challenges with Asset Management is that it often viewed as a cost rather than an investment. When markets fall then generally the pressure to reduce costs is often an action taken by companies to stay on the right side of the cost curve. Generally, the easiest place to make the cost reductions is in the area of asset management. This may show up in the form of deferred capital, major maintenance, and removal of some CM/PM programmes. It is often described as deferral of work but do you ever really catch up?

None of us would feel comfortable flying with an airline that had made significant cuts to their maintenance and replacement programmes to save costs so why are companies happy to do this within a production/manufacturing business environment?
The challenge for good asset managers is to shift the focus from cost to that of being a value-add investment in the business, through reduction of risk, increased uptime, improved productivity, and efficiency etc. It should be communicated in a way that identifies and connects the asset management strategy with the overall strategy of the enterprise.

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The ability to accumulate data has increased over recent years due to advances in digital technology, improved monitoring capability and ever-expanding fields within Asset Management systems and data bases.

Often data is collected from multiple sources and varying management systems. Some is automated production and process information; some is entered manually and other information is updated based on activity. While all of the information retrieved can be justified, often much of it is never referred to.

The challenge is to ensure that the important information is readily available to the right people and this will vary across the different layers and functions within any business. Technical subject matter experts will be interested in details of operation while senior managers are interested in high level information, the procurement people are interested in stock movements, asset technicians are interested in failure rates and operators’ day to day production performance and accounts are obviously interested in financial performance.

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