should this principle be regarded as a major guideline for this essay? The explanation is rather simple: beyond the transdisciplinary and multidimensional vitality of Asset Management, it has become clear that the two initial chapters of the ISO 55001 standard place our discipline under the two auspices of understanding the specific context inherent to each organization and of the notion of leadership, namely the ways in which roles and responsibilities are dispatched and deployed within said organizations. We must therefore respond to this observed impact of the leadership’s performance in the mobilization of the organization’s human energies in the drive to generate the profits inherent to Asset Management.
Thus, this essay was produced with these two crucial segments in mind: leadership on the one hand, and proper usage of technical and technological processes on the other.
Value extraction and long-term success are the only indisputable signs of a valid discernment in the context of Asset Management. But they would remain incomplete if efficient decisions did not aim at satisfying the conditions for a proper supervision of their implementation; in other words, not only is it vital to make the proper choices, but one should also be careful to ensure their “executability” without losing sight of the attached economic dimension it entails.
To deal with these seemingly disparate issues, we’ve chosen to organize the essay around four segments. The matrix provided below serves as the departure point for our reflection, which strives to provide the reader with a conducted tour through the various sequences of an asset’s life cycle in the order of their occurrence, from design to dismantling.
This choice is easily justified: the maturity of the professionals involved in Asset Management is on a constant rise, and since the launch of the ISO 55000 standards we’ve witnessed a considerable refinement in the questions asked by “newcomers” to our field. The notion of “life cycle” is among the main points of interest, and it appears as a major conceptual break for professionals who wish to distinguish thoroughly Asset Management from the other disciplines that aim to support industrial performance (the most obvious example being that of maintenance methods and activities).
An alternative and more personal justification for the elected layout of the essay resides in the fact that a decade ago, I published another work that sought to “give a voice” to the machines and assets, in a deliberate attempt to steer clear of methodical dogmatism. At the time, there were no existing international standards for Asset Management, and it seemed that to produce an array of conceptual answers to questions that were still in gestation would not have been a very rigorous approach. In today’s context, however, and in order to avoid the bad habit of methodological “guruization,” it was opportune and timely to produce an orderly and detailed account of the entire life cycle of assets; hence our decision to follow the trail of the full cycle of the assets’ existences, from their “project phases” to their “end of lives,” and spanning their preoperational and operational lives.
Every one of these chapters was designed in such a way as to shine a critical light on the common practices in the specific segments of the assets’ life cycles: indeed, even though these practices are often of a superior level of quality, they fail to construct a holistic rationale bent on the perspective of long-term value extraction. Therefore, we’ve chosen to proceed to a number of historical reviews, in order to document the evolution of technical processes and the various conceptual breakthroughs in the field of Asset Management, while sticking to our wish to “demystify” the overly segmented and disparate function of typical organizations. This will open the way for the development of positive perspectives of alignment, foresight, and refinement of the decision-making processes.
We strongly wish to impact positively the readers’ reflections regarding any commentary or criticism of historical facts that could be understood as an expression of disparagement or belittling. Our discourse is not one of “creative destruction,” in the Schumpeterian sense; on the contrary, we regard this process as the natural spiral of a discipline in full expansion. Our posture is therefore one that seeks to describe a positive paradigm change, rather than one of unconstructive criticism.
Despites its frequent references to the ISO 55000 series of standards, this essay is not a user guide for these standards, complete with the full set of structural guidelines that would facilitate an industrial agent’s claim for eligibility for this certification. Our focus is set on the decision-making process in Asset Management, and therefore on the necessary quality of discernment required from every industrial agent in order to manage the relevant elements that must be combined in the face of every question, issue, dilemma, or crisis relative to the management of assets.
It is quite understandable that the reader may sometimes be surprised by the apparent “redundancy” of elements or themes in various chapters of the essay. My hope is that the reader will not hold it against me; indeed, the diversity of the disciplines that have a part in Asset Management and the complexity of their intertwinement demand that these elements be repeated rather than presented in an incomplete fashion in order to ensure that their explanation is sufficiently clear and thorough. This is the reason for the thematic diversity presented in the lines of the matrix provided below, whose elements were treated in a non-linear manner according to the specific stakes of each segment of the essay.
Celso de Azevedo has a reputation in the field of Asset Management that always precedes him. I had the privilege of meeting Celso for the first time at the inaugural meeting of ISO/PC251 (Asset Management) in Melbourne, Australia in 2010. When I met him and engaged with him, I quickly learned that everything about his reputation was true. A man with a heritage spanning Brazil and France, bringing the passion we expect from those cultures to all things Asset Management in a larger-than-life way, but merged with a vast experience and ability to analyze and learn.
In our ongoing work on Asset Management in ISO/TC251 (we changed from a Project Committee to a Technical Committee with a wider scope in 2015) our focus is on helping organizations deliver “value.” For many people, the word “value” is interpreted as a financial value only, but we live in a complex world with complex stakeholder groups, each with competing demands and competing definitions of what “value” means to them. That value may be financial but it may also be safety, or environmental or ambience or reliability or a myriad of other tangible and intangible benefits depending upon the respective viewpoints of those stakeholder groups. Pleasingly, the core of this book is “value” and how it is overlaid across the asset life cycles and how it relates to costs.
This is a nice approach because in our organizational worlds, we may only have a single window through which to view one part of the asset life cycle, so for all readers there will be at least one section of the book with which they are familiar. The remainder of the sections are areas with which they should be familiar, and this is the Asset Management paradigm. Namely, we must have an understanding of all life cycle phases and all organizational functions even when our own function and window on a specific life cycle phase may be dominating our daily thoughts.
If this is not complex enough, Asset Management is a young discipline with many evangelists claiming to know the one true way! This leaves any author with a dilemma on how to balance the need to communicate a new discipline in an authoritative way to those who want to learn, while at the same time, hypothesizing and exploring how the discipline will grow. All of this needs to be achieved without appearing to shout from an ivory tower. No simple task at all!
Celso has written this book in a way that enables us to explore Asset Management thinking throughout the life cycle of the assets but with a focus on value (both tangible and intangible), recognizing the importance of cost and how we express intangible value through the measurement of monetized risk. He does not claim to have that singular truth of how to solve all Asset Management problems
