During the Mainstream Conference 2015 in Denver Co (June 7-9), there will be a panel session “Asset Management & ISO 55000 – What are they and What is in it for Me?” on Monday afternoon.  There are seven starter questions that the panelists will address during the discussion.

To get an early start on this conversation, stay tuned to our blog which will be posting insight into each question weekly, before the Mainstream Conference begins on June 7th.

Question #3

Why does every organization define asset management differently? 

Terry Wireman –  This is the third question that will be posed to the Expert Panel during Mainstream on June 8, 2015 at Denver Colorado.  How do we clearly define or differentiate between asset management, maintenance, and reliability?  In the last blog, asset management was defined as :

“The coordinated activities of an organization to realize value from the assets.”  (ISO-55000 3.3.1) Asset management identifies the “things” we do with our assets to deliver the value they were designed and purchased to deliver.

ISO-55000 2.4.2.d.2 states that “assurance… includes implementing processes for assurance of capability across all life cycle stages”.  Thus asset management applies to the entire life cycle of an asset.  This is where maintenance becomes the focus.  Since the majority of a physical asset’s life cycle cost is actually incurred during the operational and maintenance phase of its life cycle, proper maintenance policies and processes are essential to (a) insure the asset continues to perform as designed/specified and (b) insure the overall maintenance costs are consistent with what specified during the asset’s design phase.

Reliability can apply in two different phases of an assets life; during design and also during the operations and maintenance phase.  The design reliability is usually part of the overall systems engineering function when applied to assets.  The operational and maintenance reliability is usually undertaken to improve the reliability of existing assets after they have been in service for a period of time.  This is also called maintenance engineering in some organizations.

So the delineation is as follows:

Asset management is all of the activities that we undertake to realize value from the asset.

Maintenance activities are performed in operations and maintenance phase of the assets lifecycle and are designed to insure the asset continues to deliver the value it was designed to deliver.

Reliability can be applied in at least two phases of the assets life cycle, (1) design and (2) operations/maintenance.  It insures the asset delivers the design value or it improves the reliability to increase the design value.

Stay tuned for next weeks blog post – What are “Standards”?