Asset Management and Contingency Planning (page 1 of 3)

How? By focusing on the agility of their business processes, and not just their cost and efficiency.

Enterprises and government agencies must re-examine five core maintenance processes for their ability to recover quickly from unexpected disruptions. Otherwise, those organizations assume additional operating risk most can ill afford.

The prescriptions offered here not only help to ensure business continuation in emergencies, they can enhance day-to-day operating performance as well.

Managing failure is managing risk

Asset managers whether for properties, assembly lines or truck fleets know that everything fails and that their role is to manage failure at minimum cost.


Preventing all failure is no more likely than eliminating all risk. Accomplished maintenance and service managers understand that planning, predicting, and responding quickly to the unexpected is the surest way to achieve the service levels expected of them.

An often-overlooked component of effective asset life cycle management is contingency planning. Managers plan for and try to predict equipment failure before it happens. They squeeze supply and contracting budgets to eliminate waste. They train personnel to make them more efficient.

They prolong effective asset life without undue disruption to operations. It is a tremendous balancing act and much more than a necessary evil the way it is sometimes treated.

Delivering service involves the same five core processes. To be fully optimized, those processes must be cost effective, efficient, and agile. Here we look at how to make them more agile—that is, better able to respond quickly and effective when the unexpected happens.

Process 1: Asset documentation

No company operates effectively without extensive information about the technical and financial attributes of their assets including documents such as process maps, system hierarchies, and physical layouts. Engineering bills of material and spares catalogs are needed for troubleshooting and repair.

Asset information is presented by way of drawings, schematics, instructions, checklists, and specifications. Equipment manufacturer and engineering design information is supplemented in time by service and safety bulletins and fault histories. The terms of equipment warranties and service contracts and budgets and operating costs complete the asset documentation picture.

Agile asset documentation insures that such information is available on demand. At a minimum, this means secure asset information in one place, accessible by anyone in the organization. When production capacity is disrupted, asset information in one place means that an organization can quickly assess their loss as well as their ability to re-allocate resources and recover.

In daily operations, globally available asset information gives rise to sharing best practices among geographically-dispersed locations.

Process 2: Service supply chain

Supplying a maintenance or service organization requires accurate demand forecasting, a streamlined requisition and approval process, and effective sourcing and procurement of indirect materials and services. Efficient in-bound logistics, materials stores, replenishment, and reconditioning also are needed, not to mention supplier performance measurement.

The agile service supply chain is not dependent on fragile, sole sources of supply. When a supplier is affected by the unexpected, maintenance and service operations are disrupted and revenue may be lost.