Maintenance Technology September 2017 - 48

FINAL THOUGHT

What Is Asset Management?

Dr. Klaus M. Blache
Univ. of Tennessee
Reliability &
Maintainability
Center

Successful
management of
physical assets,
regardless of
type, ensures that
those assets help
businesses, in any
sector, achieve
desired results.

48 |

sset management means different things to
different organizations-and applies to a
wide range of activities. For example, plant
managers want to maintain equipment,
understand failures, and maximize throughput at
lowest cost. Facility managers are more concerned
about roof replacement, floors, piping, and utilities.
Civil engineers are interested in infrastructure
including buildings, roads, bridges, and water
systems, among other things. Land, energy, and
natural resources are also assets to be managed-and
there are managers to do it.
All of these asset managers are interested in
reliability and safety. They should all be expert at
managing their
particular assets
from cradle to
grave, i.e., concept
and proposal,
design and development, build,
install, operate,
maintain, and
decommission.
In simplest
terms, asset
management refers
to activities that
ensure physical
assets-over
the course of
their entire life
cycle-help achieve
the desired results of the business. Success, however,
requires attention to factors beyond the assets
themselves, including culture, continuous improvement, purchasing, operations, and leadership.
Reliability engineers find themselves involved
with all of those additional aspects. They can instill
a life-cycle asset-management process, starting
with a foundational culture, including plans, goals,
and metrics, then help institute standardized work
processes such as work management, conditionbased monitoring, and materials management.
Such efforts are typically followed by initiatives that
help optimize and sustain, with root-cause analysis,
equipment design for maintainability and small-team
continuous-improvement processes. The end goal
is best practices and, at the very least, top-quartile
performance.

MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY

Leadership in action
I recently returned from the 12th World Congress
on Engineering Asset Management in Brisbane,
Australia. Visitors can clearly see the results of
successful asset management through the ease of
transportation, cleanliness, planning of green space,
functionality, and other aspects of the city-with
more on the way.
According to Brisbane's Lord Mayor, Graham
Quirk, 21 kilometers of monorail are planned for
2022 to connect universities, medical facilities, technologies, and the airport. Asset management requires
leadership that can think life cycle/long term.

ISO 55000
Based on my research, while some companies are
exploring ISO 55000 certification, there doesn't seem
to be much movement toward it in North America.
At a recent Reliability and Maintainability Center
meeting, I asked member companies about their
intentions. Seventy-three percent had no plans for
certification. Nine percent were planning for it in
three years. Another 18% were only thinking about
it, but had no plans for it in the next three years.
(Actually, 68% have not even reviewed or read the
Standard.)
Although ISO 55000 covers many areas of asset
management, it doesn't guarantee best practices will
be achieved. After all, an ISO certification is only
as good as the processes that an operation agrees
to implement. Also, much of what is addressed in
ISO 55000, including reliability and maintainability,
facility engineering, manufacturing engineering,
and operational processes, is already part of many
organizational plans. In those cases, it's difficult to see
value in establishing a duplicate process. That said, if
a site doesn't yet have an effective asset-management
process in place, ISO 55000 is a good place to
start. Just make sure to include the ISO 31000 Risk
Management Standard, which is also needed.
When all is said and done, it's important for
an organization to conduct a critical review of its
business processes to confirm that asset management
is being addressed properly, and, in turn, supporting
the tactical and strategic needs of the business. MT

Based in Knoxville, Klaus M. Blache is director of the
Reliability & Maintainability Center at the Univ. of
Tennessee, and a research professor in the College of
Engineering. Contact him at kblache@utk.edu.
SEPTEMBER 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology September 2017