ID 3723955 | Weaving © Robert Paul Van Beets | Dreamstime.com
I like to think I was searching for Asset Management many years before I heard the term. This raises a fundamentalist question: what is the deep essence of AM that I sought?
It wasn’t, for me, a better way to plan renewal. Not the problem that Penny Burns invented AM to solve. At that time, I didn’t work with enough design engineers to fret that there must be a more holistic way to approach infrastructure assets. (Though, goddess knows, I have thought that many times since.)
Let me tell a little story about the infrastructure people I did work with in the 1990s.
In 1990, I ran a small subsidiary company producing software for engineering-type problems. The idea was to use AI precursors to support smarter decisions. In practice, the company wrote clever mathematical models of flow.
But it was through some of our wilder suggestions that we managed to get in front of the Operations Director of a privatised English water company, Yorkshire Water (YW). He was looking for futuristic ideas. He put me in contact with his team (‘MACE’) tasked with ‘Control Room 1999’.
I want to explore four concepts from that time.
- First of all, the research team was largely based on experience in the field: maintenance, basically. It was my first exposure to clever maintenance people.
- Second, one element in the YW development of a better way to run a water network was IT, and Yorkshire Water’s concept was Asset Information Base, or AIB. This was simply a much better, GUI way to access asset information, on a Microsoft foundation (even before Windows 3!).
- Then there is what my team got pulled into, a high-level model of the total water system. Clever maths, no AI.
- And lastly, the problem our modelling aimed to solve: better planning.
You may already see how it later felt I was destined to be an asset manager.
Modelling
It was only much more recently that I wondered about how modelling is quintessential AM. In other words, why those who wanted a better way to make asset decisions would be drawn to, even come from a background in modelling.
Talking to his colleagues a few years ago, I understood that it was complex modelling of a network – in his case, sewerage networks, at Stevenage Council – that led David Ford to Asset Management by the late 1990s. Modelling networks was, to him, the kind of thing we needed to do. And the vision that got him out evangelising and looking for good people to make into asset managers.
It was David who had the idea for a standard for AM, and his lobbying and organising that led to BS PAS 55 – the inspiration for ISO 55000. (But he really wasn’t a standards man.)
IT
I am now fairly impatient with anyone who thinks bigger databases are the answer to our problems. Modelling is much more the answer, when the challenge is predicting the future well enough to commit to longer term infrastructure plans.
However, in the 1990s I was interested in better asset data, or rather easier access to basic data. And in sharing the understanding of why we need it.
The last time I drew out how we should bring together data from different legacy (or technological) sources to a fuller picture of what is going on with our assets – was well into the 21st century. I suspect it’s only because working with organisations like NSW RailCorp who took such data for granted… that I realised this was a solved problem. Or at least one that had already been solved, if only people looked.
It was Wave 1, asset inventory. JDI and move on to the really interesting part of Asset Management.
Making better decisions
The modelling program my company developed for Yorkshire Water was known as the WRAP. It was a really neat approach, no thanks to me personally. Having worked on a fiendishly complex suite of fluid flow models, one of the team had the idea for a simplified model of a water network that would answer a different question.
Not how to design a fluid system, but how to manage it.
That person was a very clever young man, Martin Likeman, and not all of his cleverness was the nerdy kind. Yorkshire Water had a problem, soon to be played out very publicly, of how to balance a water grid. Given how much water was in each of the reservoirs, where should we take water from this week?
And working with the water resources team, how could this include predictions for how much water would be captured in each reservoir over a longer time, 25 or even 50 years?
This sounds like something a hapless PhD student would be given. But this had to work, had to be used by water planners, now. Martin could do that.
The challenge was so important that the head of water resource planning, Ian Stevens, had wonderfully try to model it in an Excel precursor… If there is ever a museum of spreadsheets, that should be in it.
For me, this turned out to be not so much what a model can do, but how people plan and should plan how to operate their assets now and into the future. Pulled into a business process re-engineering initiative, I was in the room when the planners realised Yorkshire Water faced a planning disaster, the Drought of 1995-96.
I turned out to be a planning process girl.
Better planning of asset renewal did become a bit deal in the UK later, when the water regulator mandated risk-based prioritisation of capital projects in the early 2000s.
It certainly required a more sophisticated way to think about future predictions, and some thought required complex mathematical modelling. I worked with those who believed it had to start with a better, risk-based process.
By then, thanks to David Ford, I was already dedicated to AM. And discovered Penny and SAM, through a trip David made to Australasia.
And maintenance
When I was introduced to Asset Management, I quickly discovered a strong thread of maintenance, and maintenance optimisation – for example, in the Institute of Asset Management.
That focus is still there, for example in the Global Forum for Maintenance and Asset Management. It’s still a strong thread in Australian AM, and I was glad to be re-exposed to it (and maintainers) when I worked in Sydney from 2006.
But I don’t think maintenance optimisation is the real challenge in AM. The essence is not maintenance planning (and maintenance information). That’s important, but it’s not aiming high enough.
For me, personally, the real importance of maintainers in AM is an alternative culture to design and construction engineering. A more holistic, co-operative approach to infrastructure assets.
I was inspired working along side maintenance and ex maintenance at Yorkshire Water, at NSW RailCorp, the ex-mechanics at RTD Denver. They make some of the very smartest asset managers.
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