Before embarking on their asset management journey, many organisations find themselves making asset-related decisions reactively and in isolation from other departments.

Here is a common scenario. Each department or unit, from management to finance to maintenance, speaks a different language when it comes to asset cost, risk and performance. With poor translation between these teams, decisions are taken based on the limited information available locally and therefore tend to be very reactive.
Organisations that work in silos become frustrated and unproductive due to most work being unplanned. This has a knock-on effect for worker safety with tasks being rushed. Finally, poor reliability typically means wasted revenue.

For example, let’s imagine something happens to a critical asset and a major incident occurs. The maintenance team is the first on the scene to fix the problem. The everyday heroes!
Next, the risk team wants to prevent the incident from occurring elsewhere. However, because the causes of the incident are unknown, they make sweeping decisions such as “shut them down!”
The engineering team thinks this is a HUGE overreaction. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way of translating their experience and intuitions into a risk model that the risk people will understand.
The maintenance people become annoyed because they have been warning about this for years and nothing ever gets done.
Now, customers start to leave as service levels and quality declines. This has direct financial consequences and as cash dries up, the finance team start delaying capital investment which leads indirectly to further incidents. And round we go again on this vicious cycle.
In this scenario, everyone is making good decisions based on their own limited understanding of the world. These are good people and professionals. They have certificates, standards and processes. Unfortunately, they are contributing to a system that is not making informed decisions. Add to this a multitude of contractors, suppliers and outsourcers and the idea of making cooperative decisions can seem hopeless.
So how do organisations like this move on from here? How do we align the assets and the organisational objectives in business decision making?
In order to get maximum value from an asset, you need to obtain multiple views which, in turn, leads to more informed decisions. Once people are sitting collectively to form a Strategic Asset Management Plan, you can begin the transition from “What happened?”  to, “What is happening?”  to, “What will happen?”  
Congratulations! This is the start of your Asset Management Journey.
If this seems all too familiar in your organisation, make the first step today and contact us. 
This blog is part of a series. Maintenance philosophy has evolved considerably from reactive to preventative to predictive and beyond to financial optimised. The future will bring autonomous and prescriptive maintenance.