Challenges to Asset Management Excellence

Asset intensive businesses are under constant pressure to do more with less. There is constant temptation to defer/cutback strategic initiatives.

Aging equipment and an aging workforce. Asset life extension increasingly considered as alternative to massive capital works commitment. O&M workforces are being stretched, both in terms of the amount of resource available and aging, retiring experts.

Legacy information is held in disparate (often inappropriate) sources. , and usually needs to be manually assessed by human experts to not only assess asset health, but determine an actionable prognosis.

Critical decisions are based on the interpretation of CM data, alarms etc. but this process is often subjective and open to human error. Many different parties, contractors, and services providers come and go during the life of the asset, but knowledge is not passed on, leveraged or made easily available to all parties concerned. Peer review of assessments severely lacking.

Diagram courtesy of the Institute of Asset Management

Path to excellence charts often proposed, but the precise enablers are not always clear.

In many organisations the role of predictive maintenance efforts have been soley to predict the need for maintenance interventions. By, creating a feedback loop between failure symptom, mode, and outcome, we enable those predictive maintenance efforts to move towards better fault prognosis, life extension and ultimately defect elimination, hence helping take the organisation to the next “excellence” level, and likely better business outcomes.

Reliability becomes improved by providing a platform to enable a deeper understanding of your asset’s health, and better collaboration between your condition assessors. The enhanced opportunity for reliability and condition monitoring departments to work more closely together will provide better whole of life failure mode management strategies.