Ross:
And coming right back to that slide with the truck and the road you know, you don’t know what you’re trying to answer and where you’re trying to get to, you’ll end up collecting the wrong information in the first place.
Now the other thing, I think just advice on the inventory very quickly, is that if – it’s started at a high level, get out of there quick.
Because this is fast delivery and focusing on what matters. When you do that, you can then look at that layer of information. So right, where are our risks and where are we going to get ourselves into trouble?
Grant:
And then we can focus on what more information we need, that’s right? Rather than saying we need that amount of information for everything.
Ross:
A classic example, a few years ago, not only that, if you have a specific problem, you can go out for that specific problem and collect discreet information.
And I remember I talked to Penny Burns, one of the long-term people on asset management around the world, giving an example a few years ago from Australian federal prison system.
And they had a prisoner that decided to climb up a small window.
You know prisons have buildings and they have to keep records, manage and stuff like that. That prisoner climbed up the window and died, impaled himself and died. That was very sad.
And there was this big political beat up I guess in the Australian Senate and parliament about how unsafe their prisons were.
So rather than say hey in our asset system we should have known all the little tiny bathroom windows there in every prison, a federal prison in Australia.
What they did was, this is going back a few years ago, they faxed the sheet to every prison manager and said, send somebody around and tell us how many of these we’ve got.
And within a day you know obviously, everybody knew what the need was.
The prison manager sent somebody to scoot around the prison and come back, oh yeah, prison got 5, 7, 10 of these windows whatever it was.
And they answered the information request, within a day, completely up to date, to a high level of accuracy.
Grant:
That would seem to time with their business pretty well. I would have assumed the business of the prison was keeping people on the inside.
So knowing you didn’t have windows that people could climb out is good infrastructure asset management really.
Ross:
Yes. So just coming back to the inventories. If sometimes you want to go, hey, I want to solve those sorts of problems by keeping records.
Well, invariably, in such small records you’re not going to keep them up to date properly, so you are not going to have confidence in them anyway.
So just be aware that if you have a particular issue, you can go and build a dataset very quickly to solve that issue when it arises.
And start at a higher level and like a spiral staircase, get more and more detailed in the areas where you may have higher risks.
[…] In this 30-minute video session, Ross aims to give pointers and direction on how to start working on your asset inventory. […]