Overview
This website has an intuitive and user-friendly set of on-line process and practice guidelines, templates and decision support tools that will:
- Simplify the development of consistent Total Asset Management Plans
- Provide effective Implementation Guidelines for agencies to assess and drive meaningful improvements in asset management.
The users of this website will be:
- Asset managers and operators
- State and federal regulators
- Appointed and elected officials
- Engineering consultants
- Managers and owners of contract operation firms.
Other resources that are consistent with the material on this site include:
This topic covers:
Trends for Asset Management
What will SIMPLE achieve?
How will this project benefit the Asset Management Industry?
Trends for Asset Management
The trend is for organizations to be required to do more with less. Since a large slice of an organization's expenditure relates to assets that deliver core services, it is essential to manage this expenditure more effectively by using Best Appropriate Practice (BAP) in portfolio asset management. This will ensure that customers and stakeholders are getting the level of service required, at the lowest sustainable life cycle cost or "best value".
What will SIMPLE achieve?
The objective of SIMPLE is to provide a web based asset management learning environment that will assist organizations to implement best appropriate practice life-cycle asset management programs.
These programs will assist in addressing the various external drivers for change including but not limited to:
- Increasing regulatory requirements
- Population growth
- Aging assets requiring substantial maintenance and renewal attention
- A more technically sophisticated asset base
- Increasingly limited resources and budgets
- Climate change
- Security.
By changing the way we think about how to manage assets to provide cost effective, sustainable service delivery, we can achieve a significant difference in the way in which we invest in operations, maintenance and use of capital.
By providing staff with best appropriate practice tools like SIMPLE, we can derive significant benefits in the way in which businesses operate and, more importantly, the way organizational units will work together as a total enterprise.
How will this project benefit the Asset Management Industry?
SIMPLE is intended to drive a broad range of benefits to the industry by:
- Providing a systematic rationalization for determining where the most cost effective investment (acquisition, maintenance, renewal) in the asset portfolio is, over the life cycle of the asset portfolio (that is, directing limited dollars toward the optimal application in any given budget cycle)
- Extending the life of existing assets through optimal maintenance practices and optimal rehabilitation interventions, thereby deferring major capital expenditure
- Improving the analysis of asset investments to ensure we are acquiring new or rehabilitating old assets by identifying and understanding the whole of business risk exposure
- Enabling gains in productivity and managerial effectiveness through the use of sophisticated asset management and maintenance management systems and long-term strategy and funding plans
- Improving operational efficiency in work practices
- Benchmarking our activities to drive efficiencies where justified.
By understanding our assets more clearly:
- The future demand from our customers and regulators can be forecast more accurately
- We can determine how and when our assets are likely to fail
- We will understand better the consequence of those failures to our customers and community.
Organizations can better direct limited budget resources toward the sustained performance of those assets. Likewise, by improving asset management practices and work processes and improving the quality and timeliness of the flow of data, we raise the confidence of staff, our elected officials and our stakeholders that the investment decisions we make are indeed the very best that can be made.
In short, the more we understand about our assets, the better the decisions we make about them will be.
How do we sustain system performance year after year at the lowest cost to the stakeholder and at a level of business risk acceptable to the community?
This is the essence of asset management - and the focus of SIMPLE.
The key elements of SIMPLE are:
- A framework for organizing and applying AM material, called Total Enterprise Asset Management Quality Framework (TEAMQF)
- Guidelines outlining Best Appropriate Practices to match the quality framework elements
- Case studies
- A basic implementation case study and training program based on the US EPA training program "Tom's Bad Day".