Evolving Transportation Infrastructure Management from Break-fix to Model-based

Created on October 15, 2021
Last updated on March 16th, 2023 at 10:15 am by Rizing Staff


Rizing’s CEO, EAM business, Noel Fagan recently summarized the history of Enterprise Asset Management and said the future of the industry lay in digital asset modeling.

Rizing’s CEO, EAM business, Noel Fagan recently joined a recently joined Johann Schachtner, Transportation Asset Management Solution Manager, SAP, and David Penninger, IT Program Management Director, Houston Metro Transit on a SAP® LinkedIn Live discussion hosted by Bob Evans, Creator of Cloud Wars.

During the event, Fagan summarized the history of Enterprise Asset Management and where he felt the industry was headed.

Break-Fix

“If you look at the history of infrastructure management in the transportation industry,” says Fagan, “We pretty much ran a break-fix society. We ran it to fail, and when it when it did we fixed it fix it and then eventually replaced it. Inevitably that breakdown happens in a very public way with maximum impact on people schedules. You can’t run an agency that way.”

Preventive Maintenance

“30 years ago, people started looking at preventive maintenance as as a way of getting ahead of that curve, says Fagan. “We created preventive maintenance strategies and standardized repair operations to remove the variability and brinksmanship from running asset management networks to fail.”

Predictive Maintenance

“Now the buzzword is prediction,” says Fagan. “We can extrapolate based on historical use and telemetry and start to predict when things are going to fail. We can stop spending so much money on preventive maintenance and use those funds in other new asset acquisition.”

Digital Asset Modeling

“Modeling is the next piece,” he says. “Predictive can only take you so far as the trend line will take you. What happens to the Houston Metro if you don’t factor in climate change? What happens when it gets hotter? What buckles? What fails? That’s the horizon we must start thinking about. The technology is there. And to some extent the data underpinning it is now starting to be accurately collected.”

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