What is asset management? How’s it different from maintenance management?
First, I think you have to further define asset management as “physical asset management” because there are a lot of things that are assets that can be managed. Most people think in terms of finances when the words asset management is used. You need to think about it this way:
You have two budgets
- CapEx budget which is the capital budget
- OpEx budget which is the operations and maintenance budgets
When you combine these two budgets under one umbrella you have what I call asset management.
I often use the example of Life Cycle Costs. Let’s discuss phases in Life Cycle Cost
Asset management – the Project Phase
The project phase is when you are designing, specifying and determining details when buying equipment for your plant. By the end of this phase you have spent about 80% of the cost and locked in 70 – 80% of the future LCC – so you had better have made good decisions regarding maintainability and reliability centered design. One thing we have seen missed is the Bill of Materials for the equipment. The earlier you get the BoMs in a project the less it will cost you in the long-run.
When you can combine your CapEx budge with the OpEx budget you have really mastered the concept of asset management. When you operate and maintain equipment and record the history you are able to feed that information back for the next project’s design phase so that you don’t make mistakes the next time you buy new equipment.
