3 What does an AM Team do – and what can it do

This is part 3 of the 5 part series by Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps on Building an Asset Management Team.

Three: What are the key activities required of an AM team?

Penny Burns identifies three phases (or ‘revolutions’) that it is worth considering when you look at building up AM capabilities.

First, there is ‘Asset Inventory’: ensuring we actually know what assets we manage, where they are, what condition they are in, cost, expected life and their type and model and age.

If you have poor asset information, you have little choice but to start here.

The next stage is what she calls ‘Strategic Asset Management’, in other words ‘Optimization’: using this data, along with our understanding of the assets and asset systems, to begin to optimize at every level. This is where it starts to get interesting.

What does this require from the Asset Management team?

1. Co-ordinating the integrated Asset Management Plan
2. Leading the implementation of Asset Management, including AM training
3. The development and implementation of co-ordinated, whole life asset strategies both at class and system level
4. Key role in defining the asset information strategy (but not doing the IT or entering data – which are a waste of AM skills)
5. Focus for improved asset decision techniques and models to do the optimizing

Other potential responsibilities of an AM team include helping to define the top level KPIs or Levels of Service. If Asset Management is about aligning asset decisions and plans to the organizational objectives, the first issue for many North American organizations is that the latter aren’t well defined. Sometimes, that inevitably means AM practitioners have to be involved in helping to define them. (And that is explicit for levels of service in ON Reg 588/17.)

It seems inevitable that Asset Management also has to take an active role in developing an overall organizational risk management framework, even if the lead is taken by a specific corporate risk function. This is not just because this is a key requirement in ISO 55000 back to back with ISO 31000; good AM depends on a solid and consistent risk framework across the organization and across all risks.  Physical assets can impact on just about every corporate objective, which means they can also contribute to just about every type of risk you have.

Penny believes skilled AM practitioners are key to the next revolution, too: better ‘Infrastructure Decision Making’, by which she means society making better decisions for new infrastructure, especially in a time of change and new technologies such as we face now. Technologists and traditional ‘Planning’ are not experienced in the practicalities of managing complex asset systems, and without this real expertise, we are unlikely to make best use of opportunities.

Note:  Talking Infrastructure was specifically created
to explore and develop this third stage, or ‘next revolution’.

Next week we look at what kind of people  an AM Team requires.