Developing an Asset Management Program for Maximum Impact

Defining Program Strategy, Management and Oversight 

• Secure executive sponsorship and commitment. Developing an asset management policy is also a great place to start and aligns with the ISO 55000 standard for asset management. 
• Develop an asset management plan (AMP). It puts your objectives into practice, identifies risks, inter­ven­tion strategies and what program­matic initiatives you intend to take to meet your asset management objectives.
• Assemble an all-star asset management steering committee. This cross-functional committee should be no more than 5 members, and it’ll play a pivotal role in setting the direction, defining the asset management strategy, ensuring program suitability for all stake­hold­ers, building consensus, monitoring performance and identifying improvement initiatives. Create a dedicated role for an asset manager and build a team to support and evolve with the program. 

Elevating People for Peak Performance

• Identify any staffing and capability gaps in your orga­ni­za­tion that might prevent you from checking off all your asset management objectives. Engage operations and maintenance staff – they’re vital to sustaining the program.
• Put a little legwork behind developing and training your staff, as specialized roles and specific skills will be needed. Consider developing career roadmaps for the positions you create (i.e. asset manager, maintenance planner and scheduler, Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) admin­is­tra­tor and potentially a reliability engineer for facility-oriented utilities).
• Take a look at the data you already have to define and justify your staffing and budgetary needs.

Optimizing Processes

• Consider best practices, partic­u­larly from the Institute of Asset Management and ISO 55000. Identify what your team must define, streamline, or standardize with guidance from the steering committee.
• Document your processes in workflow maps or standard operating procedures and assign account­abil­ity for their adoption and revision over time. Choose software that’s aligned with your business processes to it’s easier to adopt. 

Making Data-Driven Decisions

• Put in the time to define the locations and level of depth you’ll track your assets. Your program objectives will define data require­ments.
• Develop and deploy an asset criticality framework that relatively ranks assets according to your orga­ni­za­tion’s values and priorities. Use criticality and consequence of asset failure to inform lifecycle management strategies, and focus on management/mitigation strategies for your most critical assets.
• The risk management results should be defensible and should allow you to make comparisons across your orga­ni­za­tion. These will prioritize inspections, maintenance, repairs, replace­ments and capital projects. Make sure the right people, processes and tools are aligned to collect and sustain your data require­ments. 

Choosing Software Wisely

• The software you use should be a tool and an enabler – it’s not a substitute for an asset management program. A great Comput­er­ized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. Your tool of choice must also promote maintenance management and capture performance history over time.
• Get to know your system of choice. EAMS’s can be recon­fig­ured to better support asset management, but older systems are more restrictive and may need to be re-vamped from scratch. The quality of the information the software puts out will depend on its adoption, along with training users up and quality testing.