In order to achieve an optimal creation of value, the action of the engineers must be similarly aligned to that of other branches of the organizational chart. Indeed, in the notion of Line of Sight, introduced in the referential document BSI PAS 55, it is stated that it is crucial to take into account the expectations and interests of stakeholders and to ensure that these are aligned with operational actions from the earliest stages of the preoperational phase as they are the more intricately tied with the assets’ proper financial and physical health. They are, in the end, the most prevalent factor in the achievement of the required performance.
1.3 Decision-Making in the Preoperational Phase: Atony Comes at a Cost
In the overwhelming majority of organizations, we can observe that a vast number of industrial projects are bought or designed on behalf of preexisting rationales and by the means of a reproduction of anterior projects. Industrial decision makers often try to justify these practices through commercial agreements (a typical example would be that of turnkey projects) or through political and economic reasons. Organizations benefit from this approach on the short term, by making economies of scale and by radically reducing the temporal and budgetary resources mobilized for conception. However, this “recooked” approach to the design phase is in stark opposition to the inherent principles of Asset Management and to every notion brought forth by studies on life cycle costing.
Let us consider, in order to exemplify this line of thought, the case of industries that rely heavily on continuous processing (such as metallurgy, chemicals, etc.) or on massive amounts of fixed capitals (such as automobile manufacturing or large-scale infrastructures, e.g., water processing). In four out of five of these cases, the mechanical installations (for example, a line of laminators) are purchased “key in hand.” It would be disproportionate to expect from organizations that they reinvent their entire field of activities for every new project that they implement. However, the present rationale, which takes its roots on the one side in the faith placed in a certain economic illusion on the part of the decision makers and, on the other, in an analysis betrayed by a profound misunderstanding of the machines’ life cycles, is strongly problematic. This is because those who abide it remain, despite their best intentions, unaware of the changes that occur every day in the spheres of economics, finance, and technology, as well as of the needs and interests of stakeholders.
To indefinitely reconduct such projects is a symptom of a refusal to recognize that the world is in permanent mutation and that it is both responsible and proactive to try and adapt to its evolution. On the contrary, acting as though “one could bathe twice in the same river” appears as a posture of pure negligence.
The teams of engineers that operate in the design offices of these heavy industries are well aware of the necessity of associating metrics of performance to every project being developed. But those very metrics have been designed in a frame that is constrained to the task of conception, or the “project” phase. Thus, the measurement units that are used to qualify projects are unfit to assess their performance in their mature lives, and are therefore inefficient or imprecise at best.
1.4 An Opportunity for Improvement in Asset Design
Asset Management strongly supports the creative freedom of designers and conception agents since it is an undeniable vector of the rise of a new holistic perspective, which takes into account the assets’ complete life cycles. It is therefore essential to encourage the innovative work of engineers. In order to do so, a number of techniques have been developed thanks to the input of life cycle costing and trade-offs studies. Not only are these techniques now broadly available, but their efficiency has been demonstrated empirically.
Why, then, do managers not strive to more efficiently align objectives as early as the preoperational phase? Why do they not attempt to master practices such as risk monetization? Indisputably, a number of them have already begun to do so. However, they only make up a marginal portion of industries so far and, in most of these cases, the methods employed remain rudimentary. Yet the shortfalls which derive from this posture are nothing short of phenomenal. The growing democratization of the availability of applications and software relying on very powerful algorithms should contribute to the evolution of these “modes de travail,” which are still widespread.
It has never been so easy for an organization to achieve the alignment of its objectives and the monetization of its risk factor. The tools and skills required for these tasks are now universally available. The fantasy, deeply rooted within the industrial spheres and which depicts Asset Management as a field of experts estranged from economic realities, must necessarily be revoked. It is crucial that the agents of Asset Management succeed in sensitizing organizations to the added value that would come out of a proper management of their industrial assets, and to the necessity of implementing such a management.
Today, we are capable of drawing out and quantifying the entire set of economic consequences resulting from a good or a bad CAPEX. Why should we not do so? We are also able, when choosing or designing an asset, to anticipate the technical and economic consequences in both qualitative and quantitative forms (through previsions tied with OPEX and risk). Once more, why should we not do so? By what logic can a design office manager consider that it would be wiser to refrain from implicating an Asset Manager? In this regard, the stellar rise of the Building Information Modelization (or BIM)—an approach very similar to Asset Management practices, and which has quickly been adopted in the sphere of construction—is exemplary. Industries cannot allow themselves to pass on such opportunities any longer; they must, consequently, equip themselves with means of value anticipation. The future will undoubtedly confirm my intuition that Asset Management will be the spirit (and BIM, the skeleton) of the infrastructures of tomorrow.
Through these examples, we have attempted to show that organizations must become aware of the importance of a rational management of their assets from the earliest stages of their life cycles. We will now draft out a few of the methods, inherent to Asset Management, which allow industries to establish an optimization of the creation of value in the preoperational phase.
At the core of this notion are the ideas of Asset Breakdown and Asset Register. The former can be defined as a tree-structured model, which presents the functional and material components of the asset that is to be acquired or produced; the latter is an accounting method, which consists of taking an exhaustive inventory of an organization’s assets fleet. Therefore, it is clear that a thorough practice of the Asset Breakdown allows for a better definition of the parameters and the contents of an organization’s Asset Register.
Today, the Asset Register has become a sine qua non requirement for an operational asset system to be in compliance with the current standards; how practical, for contemporary industrials, that equipment is now systematically delivered with its Asset Register (which entails the complete listing of an organization’s assets categorized in at least three sub-classes: Asset Portfolios, Asset Systems, and Individual Assets). One should keep in mind that it has not always been so, much to the detriment of operators. Additionally, the massive democratization of ERPs—these tentacular informatic programs that link every organizational function—has also introduced new protocols of intra-tree structure relationships between assets, often comprised of nine levels (familial hierarchy between the assets of the Asset Register). In some alternative cases, ERP editors have imposed the use of the standardized protocol defined by the ISO 27000 (Security of Information Systems), which also presents the data imputable to the assets on different hierarchic levels. We should therefore rejoice over the growing influence of Asset Management inputs on the very structure of the industrial world, since in this case we’ve truly witnessed, throughout the last few years, a process of clarification and standardization of Asset Register practices, to the extent that they can now be regarded as truly reliable.
This first phase of an asset’s life cycle, which covers its breakdown and its inclusion in the Asset Register, is much simpler nowadays than it had been in the past. Thus, considering how useful it can prove to be in the long run, it is now unjustifiable for an industrial manager to accept that this