Effective Asset Management

How do utilities achieve effective asset management given the extent and technical challenges posed by distributed networks of buried assets?

Infrastructure asset management is a challenge of global importance not only because of the economic and social value of the services provided, but also the extent, complexity, and cost of service provision. For pressure pipes in particular, these challenges are magnified by uncertain asset deterioration processes and because most assets are not easily accessible.

The Key

The key to successful asset management is making timely interventions to maintain and augment system capacity in the face of changing standards and an ageing asset stock. Moving to a more effective and efficient asset management process delivers greater value for a given level of expenditure or, if needed, delivers required outputs and outcomes at reduced cost.

Multiple Scale Approach

In practical terms, asset management involves a combination of management, financial, economic, engineering and other practices applied to physical assets with the aim of delivering required levels of service at an acceptable level of risk. This involves analysis over three planning horizons; the strategic, tactical and operational.

Risk and Asset Management

The analysis of risk is fundamental to asset management in any asset intensive organisation. For water and other utilities, the distributed nature of asset stocks means that not all risks are carried by the business. Some are effectively borne by customers (e.g. due to service interruptions), whilst others are imposed on communities (e.g. as traffic disruption) and/or the environment (e.g. as pollution incidents and environmental degradation).

These asset-related risks need to be managed to the extent that they are tolerable. There is also a need to manage life cycle costs, which again involves optimisation of risk exposure.

Formalised risk-based approaches thus provide a natural framing for the context of asset management and are the basis of all our approaches.

Evolution of Best Practice

Best practice asset management used to be about assets, knowledge and skills, but it is increasingly becoming more about information, systems and decision support tools. These compliment rather than replace the knowledge and wisdom of asset management practitioners.

Effective tools thus need to help build and sustain institutional capacity, not undermine it.

ISO 55000

In complex organisations, ISO 55000 is a necessary but insufficient step towards effective asset management.

ISO 55000 defines asset management as the "coordinated activity of an organization to realize value from assets". It is a top down management system approach designed to provide a line of sight from business strategy down to assets.

For it to be effective in delivering triple bottom line outcomes, ISO 55000 needs the asset data-information loop to be closed. In other words, it must be made ‘real’ through the implementation of bottom up processes that provide intelligence on system condition, reliability, performance and capacity. If this isn’t done, the management system is just another corporate badging exercise.

PARMS and other WISER Analysis tools and techniques are designed to close this loop in a cost-effective manner.

Understanding Criticality

Asset criticality is a key aspect of asset management. Criticality is a measure of the importance of an asset to the utility business. This may reflect the asset’s operating context, its role in service provision, its potential failure consequences, or just its modern-equivalent replacement value.

Prudent management strategies reflect the criticality of the assets in question.