Nobody Pays Attention to Asset Management Priorities: Sustainability Threats

Written by admin on May 6th, 2011

At your next board room meeting, asset management priorities will not be the primary topic and you should be ready. In most situations, business executives would most often assign asset management to manual and tedious processes which can be prone to errors, with high consequent costs in the long run. There might be strong and detailed attention given to the procurement of assets, but in most situations, assets start to get neglected once these are installed.

Only correct asset monitoring and management can help in attaching true value on a particular asset. An asset’s net efficiency would be the result of an asset’s ability to perform at par with purpose it was intended for, along with its absolute energy efficiency. This latter metric is often overlooked, yet it has many hidden meanings.

Asset management priorities might not be among the top priorities in the boardroom. Indeed, the subject may not appear on your agenda at all. Business executives are often mistaken in the deployment of tedious and manual asset management, which can be prone to error, not aware of the long term costs attributed to this mistake. Much attention is given to capital planning and the purchase of items of equipment, but not much attention is paid once the assets have been installed.

There is a need to set asset management priorities to help find out energy efficiency of every single asset. When measured against a benchmark, individual asset efficiency can be monitored on a real-time basis and this will help to reveal problems as they begin to arise. In most situations, a problem would surface once an equipment fails, and it is expected that there will be consequences. An asset that would start to be consuming beyond normal levels as shown in the monitoring could be a warning sign.

Asset failure causes a lack of productivity, downtime, expensive technician callout charges and can, in certain circumstances, lead to the failure of other items of equipment, as well. It’s inconceivable that executives leave so much to chance by failing to recognize asset-management priorities, but this picture is repeated across the country on a daily basis.

In order that an organization would truly take ownership of its carbon footprint and its impacts to the environment and society, it has to be fully aware of the scale of its own footprint. Unless asset-management priorities have been established, an equipment inventory may not be up-to-date and may not be able to contribute valuable information to a footprinting exercise.

Before a carbon footprint can be established along the road to pure energy efficiency, each individual piece of equipment throughout the organization must be identified, categorized, tagged and monitored. The process of tagging by itself may make the business more efficient and more focused. In the case of a smaller mobile asset, there could be a clear vulnerability to theft or misuse.

The larger a business gets, the more the executive teams are inclined to accept the status quo. The usual fear is towards the complexity of the business, making asset inventory almost impossible to be completely deployed. However, it is common that there would be dedicated teams within tagging specialist organizations, who are not easily scared. Using a specific process, dedicated software and experienced technicians, even the most complex of distributed organizations can be handled.

Asset-management priorities will become much more important as the price of energy continues to alarm, as a growing call for sustainability is heard and organizations start to find every opportunity to make their businesses more efficient and productive against growing competition.

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