A trope is a “common or overused theme or device.” The tvtropes.org website has examples:
- Dialogue in an action movie will always be heard above the din of car chases and explosions.
- Every pregnant sitcom character must attend a Lamaze natural childbirth class accompanied by the least suitable partner possible.
One classic trope is Poor Communication Kills. One character withholds information from another, causing them to make poor decisions or mistakes. Hijinks ensue, right up until when the hero realizes where the communication broke down and saves the day.
According to David Harrison, Rizing’s Director of Business Development in Asia, poor communication isn’t just a factor in TV plots. It’s one of his three reasons an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Strategy is often overlooked:
1. Communication challenges
“Maintenance people can find it a challenge to take off the overalls, put on the suit and head up to the 7th floor to tell the company C-suite that a piece of equipment isn’t getting maintained correctly,” Harrison says. “And by not maintaining it right, the company is at a greater health and safety-related risk. Or worse.”
It’s not just the wardrobe change that makes that task difficult. The maintenance staff may not have the language of the C-suite to tell their story.
2. Focus on maintenance
“If you’re a maintenance organization and not asset management focused, you can’t communicate the entire picture.” says Harrison. “If you take your car to a workshop for repairs, they just fix it. They don’t care what you’re going to do with that vehicle tomorrow, next year, or in five years.”
“That’s just maintenance,” he says. “But asset management is about understanding the life cycle of that asset. Is the asset doing its job? How is it being used? Can I get better value out of it? Can I keep it longer? Should I upgrade it? When should I sell it?”
For the C-suite you need a business case based on the right data that is accurate. A maintenance-focused company isn’t going to have the right data to support the right story to share with the C-Suite.
And not being able to cost-justify themselves, the inevitable happens.
3. Trimmed budgets
“Maintenance shops are viewed as a cost center,” says Harrison. “Without a bigger picture story to tell, there’s a tendency to go ‘Well, you can’t justify your budget as well as other departments, so we have trimmed your budget by 10%.'”
But don’t despair. There is hope.
EAM changes the narrative
“With a good EAM system, you have the data to justify your expenditure,” says Harrison. “You can say ‘75% of my costs are overhauls and preventative maintenance. Which of those projects do you want me to stop doing to meet that smaller budget?'”
The data can then be used to show the effects of a particular decision.
“Asset Management processes managed through a robust system will show people what they get for their money,” says Harrison. “If by doing less preventative maintenance we now know we’re doubling the odds of an outage that costs, say, $1,000,000 a day, that’s an easy sell for the right budget.”
Happy endings
“At Rizing EAM we help asset-intensive companies optimize their asset management and SAP EAM solutions so their operations can run efficiently and users can work smarter,” says Harrison. “We are not your typical professional services and solutions firm. We’re EAM business experts who are also IT solution providers.”
Trim the trope
Learn more about how your business can avoid becoming yesterday’s trope: Rise with SAP and Rizing.