Physical Asset Management

Organisations, utilities and individuals own assets in order to derive benefits from them. Within asset intensive industries, these assets are required to contribute to transformative processes which add value to a product or service. The field of asset management is the science and engineering behind the transformation process which creates optimal contribution from the assets to an organisations business goals.

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These goals are typically made up of combinations of the following elements of contribution:

Increased asset productivity.
Reduced life cycle costs in running and maintaining the assets.
Managed risk and opportunity related to the performance of the assets.
Increased life of the assets.
Improved coordination between the availability of the asset, and the use of this availability.
Improved product quality for the asset.

Physical asset management is often associated with the discipline of maintenance, which modern thinking defines as a repair or restorative function, which juxtaposes the concept of asset management which proactively creates business advantage from ownership of the asset. Within the asset intensive industries, asset management is seen as a key contributing component to the field of Operational Excellence.

Measuring Asset Contribution

The key leading metric for measuring asset contribution is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) which simultaneously measures the availability, throughput (use of availability) and quality yield of an asset system. The measurement of OEE is illustrated in the following diagram.

A Systems Approach to Physical Asset Management

Leading organisations and practitioners have concluded that in order to create optimal asset contribution, a systems approach to driving performance is necessary. This incorporates the many elements of contribution necessary that influence asset performance. How these are applied will vary from industry to industry and organisation to organisation, but have the following common elements;

Aligning asset management to the business needs.
Driving reliability through reliability performance interventions, good condition monitoring, work management addressing risk, and continuous improvement.
Recent systems thinking incorporates the support elements such as skills and competencies, organisational culture, leadership, change and knowledge management as essential elements into the overall asset management system.

Effort of the last number of years has led to the development of two standards related to a systems approach to Physical Asset Management. These are PAS 55 and ISO55000.

PAS 55

PAS 55 is a Publicly Available Specification for the management of physical assets. It was developed by the Institute of Asset Management. The specification offers guidelines and good practices to enable the optimal management of physical assets. The standard is particularly useful in capital intensive environments such as electricity, gas, and water networks. The specification provides a useful framework for meriting the link between strategic business objectives and the policies and plans for asset operation and maintenance management.

Organisations can be assessed against the PAS 55 framework and receive a certificate of endorsement against the framework by an IAM Endorsed Assessor.

ISO 55000 and Asset Management

In 2014 an ISO standard was published on asset management entitled asset management. This standard has been developed for organisations who:

Wish to improve the realisation of value for their organisation from their asset base.
Those involved in the establishment, implementation, maintenance and improvement of an asset management system.
Those involved in the planning, design, implementation and review of asset management activities; along with service providers.

In an explanatory note the standard states that, the standard is intended to be used for managing physical assets in particular, but it can also be applied to other asset types. Organisations can asses, or get themselves assessed against the ISO 55000 framework, using the IS0 17086 standard.