At this stage, Heather moved on to a different topic, which is on asset management versus managing assets.
Heather says:
So what I wanted to talk a little bit about is the theme that’s coming up in a couple of different areas.
I’m starting to hear it about companies, private companies in asset management. Then I was recently at a conference in Australia that was talking about asset management, and the same theme came up.
And it is something that we ran into a lot with utilities here in the US. So, I want to bring up this topic, and the issue is asset management versus managing assets.
And it might sound like those two things are the same, and what would be the difference between managing assets versus asset management. But they’re quite different.
There’s quite a, quite a difference between the strategic direction which is asset management.
So, we’re talking about:
- leadership
- communication
- the strategic direction of the overall program
- what are you trying to accomplish with your entire program
- setting these level service goals
- looking at risk
- seeing risk as the bigger picture of “I’m investing and the items of my inventory that have the greatest risk and I’m managing it as a whole.”
And then when we talk about managing assets, that’s what we do to an individual asset.
So the operation and maintenance that we do for an individual asset. If we’re going to do maintenance on a hydrant or a well or pump, that is managing that asset.
And what we start to see when people may be initially taking on asset management or haven’t thought deeply enough is that they get really hung up in the managing assets part rather than the asset management piece.
So, we want to make sure that while managing assets is important, and we don’t want to imply that that’s not true, it is definitely important that we do our maintenance work or operation work or doing all those things.
We want to also get above that and say we still need that strategic direction.
We still need the governing body to engage in asset management, to participate in that whole strategic process.
We need the communication to go back and forth, between customers and elected leaders, customers and the utility, the operation and the maintenance folks and the leadership. There has to be this bigger picture.
PHOTO CREDIT: EFC Network
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