Читать книгу Asset Management Insights - Celso de Azevedo - Страница 6
ОглавлениеTo produce a historical account of our discipline’s genesis would be an exercise both tedious and, in the end, only sparsely instructive. What strikes us as more pressing, considering the shortfalls, the approximations, and the genuine mistakes made on a regular basis by some of those who claim to know our subject’s intricate workings, is to come back to the deeply rooted causes of its emergence in order to demonstrate that its development was inscribed in a rationale of necessity.
In the 1980s, as in other turning moments in history, the industrial and infrastructural worlds experienced a paradigm shift, thus setting the scene for a positive transformation of our relation to the management of assets, namely the means (physical or not) through which an organization seeks to extract value from the assets’ operation throughout their life cycles. By illustrating this progression, we hope to shed a light on the foundations and the inherent dynamics and logics of Asset Management, as well as to respond to the questions and criticisms expressed by those who claim, against all reason, to view it as nothing more than a superfluous appendix of industrial maintenance or, for that matter, of any operational discipline that plays a part in the challenges of Asset Management without embodying its totality.
Similarly, we wish to prove wrong those who, failing to understand our discipline’s mechanisms, dogmatize it to the point of rigidity; the very self-proclaimed experts who, when they are not busy dogmatizing Asset Management, feel entitled to discuss it even though they can only boast a superficial or partial knowledge of the matter. In other words, we intend to provide a positive vision of the management of assets, founded on a true conceptual rigor but exemplified by experience.
Needless to say, this demonstration cannot claim to offer a somewhat utopian character of certainty. I myself have been so lucky as to pursue just about the entirety of my career in this discipline’s emergence and momentum; therefore, my perspective is eminently initiatory, and simultaneously covers a practice spread over several decades, a conceptual stack validated by empiricism, and the occasional trials and errors of the scientific thought.
Furthermore, it goes without saying that the history of scientific thought should not be devised as a straight axis, whizzing through the ages without twisting and turning. On the contrary, we know that science advances through experience, and therefore through trials and failures—progress deriving, in fine, from our right to make mistakes. This road towards progress is therefore characterized by the systematic confrontation of “old” questions to innovative and crystallizing solutions, themselves made available by the frequent theoretical achievements that accompany the process. It is therefore obvious that a more performant system can only be designed by learning from the dysfunctions of one previously experienced—which isn’t to say that we should reject as a whole every particular element of an anterior model, but rather that we should learn to draw the consequences from past failures, as soon as novel and superior ideas have been demonstrated beyond doubt.
In compliance with this rationale, it is specifically in the faults and the shortfalls of the classical models of production and management that one should seek the foundations of Asset Management. Moreover, that is how I was myself first confronted with the issue, as a young engineer hired as a maintenance manager of an infrastructure network.
If I choose to discuss industrial maintenance specifically and as a form of stepping stone for Asset Management, it is also because I appreciate that my situation as a former maintenance manager is far from singular. To this day, three decades after the first projects undertaken with a set of international colleagues, I still observe that a remarkable and continuous proportion of managers who commit to Asset Management or even to ISO 55001 Certification programs and approaches come from the field of maintenance on the worldwide scale.
Of the Necessity of Developing a Rigorous Asset Management Discipline
I often tell the tale of my first confrontation with failure: in that time, I was still working as a maintenance manager in my native Brazil, having recently graduated. I worked for a major public transports operator, and my position came with all that one could expect at the time in terms of tools and practices. Despite praiseworthy evolutions in the field of technological tools and practices, contemporary conventions and individual mindsets encountered in the maintenance sector have moreover remained almost unaltered since those days. We were stubborn and determined mechanics, and yet we paradoxically lacked any model of strategic vision for our task. Our workload was cadenced by a cycle of degradations and failures of the rolling stock and of the infrastructures over which we apparently had very little control, if not none at all.
Fatally, technical issues would arise. Machines would become inoperable and we would stubbornly strive to repair them, unquestioning of our absurd condition as “luxury spare parts exchanger,” however qualified we may have been as engineers.
Still, restricting the action of such a set of engineers to interventions that irretrievably would be limited to the replacement of a defective mechanical part or equipment would not provide us with solutions fit to break this vicious cycle. Sisyphean tinkerers, we incurably repeated the same patterns, without stopping to wonder whether our function was the right one. In this regard, the arrival on the market of CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) or Operational Reliability softwares have only comforted us in the idea that we were doing “a good job,” by making the realization of the tasks we’d grown used to performing a whole lot easier.
My role was confined to repairing what could be repaired in the rolling stock, as it grew more ancient and the failure rate soared. This type of operation, inscribed in the fields of short-term and reactive activity, seemed to content my employers—after all, this was precisely why I’d been recruited. Yet, I gauged the contents of my warehouse and noted, privately, that we were operating in an irrational fashion. We reached our output goals, of course, and that was enough to satisfy my bosses—but even then it seemed clear to me that our management of assets and infrastructures derived from a “wait-and-see” mentality. Thus I felt a real sense of frustration, which would only deepen throughout the rest of my training, which was far from complete at the time.
With this in mind, I expressed my impressions to my former manager, only to find that he paid little attention to my reflections. A preventive maintenance–centered set-up, the likes of which I was beginning to envision, was, according to him, both costly and hazardous. Worse yet, when he would later come to adhere to the ideas I’d exposed, he would only do so out of self-consciousness and without resorting to a posture of technical objectivity in considering the issue and the models of realization that it should prop up.
There are millions of ticking time bombs in factories around the world. They might be quiet, but professionals in charge of assets know them well. At the very least, they suppose their existence. Some of them are sensitive to the ticking sound: they try to prevent the explosion but can only postpone it. Others pretend not to hear the ticking sound in the belief that they can do nothing to stop it. Thus, one way or another, sooner or later, bombs will blow up.
These bombs result from poor decision making in the field of industrial Asset Management. Such decisions are calibrated on the company’s targets set by superior management, then travel through the company and down the ranks. When they reach the plant, their impact is considerable. Cuts will be requested successively in the budgets of maintenance, engineering, and in the modification plans projected on machines. An increase in production capacity will be imposed regardless of the mid- and long-term consequences. A decrease in the stock of spare parts will be decided with no consideration for the risk incurred by their absence. Machines will be physically operated well beyond their economic life cycle, and so on.
There are legitimate reasons behind these decisions: as globalization enhances competition, optimizing manufacturing and maintenance costs becomes vital.
As it was, business was going steady, which seemed to demonstrate beyond all doubt the soundness of the task I’d been assigned. For the first time, I was confronted with a duality that underlies to this day the reflections linked with the production and the management of industrial assets: that which opposes effectiveness and efficiency. In a somewhat Machiavellian fashion and under cover of either oversized investments or not-so-demanding stakeholders (often a combination of both of these factors), organizations have consistently repeated a pattern of putting their managers in a situation where they are more encouraged to “display service” than to deliver it in an optimal manner.
It was only a while later, as I was completing a post-graduate degree in France, that I finally managed to pinpoint and frame the precise purpose of my questions. A strikingly simple analogy dawned on me. The task I’d set for myself implied that I should behave, in my dealings with the machines, as a doctor would—but I’d never been handed the tools that would allow me to better understand their ills. I arranged a meeting with the dean of the nearest medical faculty, and asked for his guidance: “How does one make a young man into a doctor?” I enquired. The first year of medical faculty, he informed me, fundamentally relies on three complementary axes of study: primarily, anatomy (namely the physical composition of the human body); secondly, physiology (namely the functions that allow organs to interact between themselves); and finally, medical psychology, which qualifies the attitudes one should adopt when confronted with issues of illness and death. Biology and physiology, I mused, are rather self-evident; if one wishes to heal a body, it is logical that he should learn to know its particular workings. However, I realized at the same time that in my line of work, it was by no means required to be aware of what would constitute the “counterpart” of biology, namely the machines’ life cycles and reliability. Hence, it was only after leaving my functions as a maintenance manager that I finally realized that the heart of the Asset Management matter lay in the disciplines of reliability and life cycle.
However, it was the third field of medical knowledge that affected me most profoundly: the psychology of death, which designates the idea that any organism will eventually collapse. Was that not the very notion that my peers so dearly lacked—these maintenance operators who stubbornly and beyond all reason strived to repair, heal, mend, and patch their machines, thus turning an eternal blind eye to their declining productivities and their ever-more-frequent failures?
As these thoughts were taking shape in my mind (in the early 1980s), NASA, together with the military complex, was developing life cycle cost analysis or LCC, a tool allowing one to assess the total cost of an asset throughout the entirety of its life cycle. This method was a much-needed refining of and complement to the design-to-cost approach, which was prevalent in those days. Indeed, it featured in its results the entire array of costs tied with an asset on the totality of its life cycle, as opposed to being restricted to the budgets allocated to the design phase. LCC made it possible to realize a long-term assessment of the assets based on anticipations over their technical and economic performance, thus facilitating the first step on the path towards a preventive-centered management policy. The ultra-liberal movement of that era, conceptually embodied by the theses of the Chicago school, favored studies focusing on the Net Actual Value and Internal Rate of Return to analyses that took into account the costs and expenditures tied with investment projects in the long run. As of that period, the Reagan administration took up the question of the privatization of municipality-owned transportation in the United States, which undoubtedly marked a decisive impulse in the democratization of life cycle costing, which has become a most common notion in contemporary economics.
That which derived from the synthesis of this innovative cost-analysis method and of the embryonic discipline of machine biology was the crystallization of a need to manage the asset on its integral life cycle; a need which evidently comes hand in hand with technical processes, but cannot be restricted to the latter since it is inevitable that inscribing such an approach in a long-term horizon will also induce an urge to create a specific management system. However, we now know that the extraction of value is only conceivable in a perspective that takes into account the entirety of an asset’s life cycle and, therefore, its global economy and management. It therefore transpires that parallel to the emergence of a necessity (to move away from a deficient model derived from the theses of the Chicago school), the scientific community was equipping itself with a technical arsenal that made it possible to extract the value from assets on their entire life cycles—which is to say that we were gradually giving ourselves the means to undertake a journey specific to Asset Management.
We should furthermore observe that the blossoming of this new discipline was truly made possible only through the aggregation of competencies originating from diverse fields of knowledge. On one hand, we drew on the skills inherited from maintenance; on the other, we possessed a physical knowledge of the machines, derived from reliability-based studies, which had known a strong growth after the end of the Second World War; and finally, we had at our disposal a new perspective on economics, arising from the development of life cycle costing. These elements fueled and helped shape the new models of management that were arising at the time, and particularly those induced by the emergence of quality repositories.
It is therefore rather clear that the emergence of Asset Management was inscribed in a particular theoretical and economic context, and specifically one where new requirements were being set in almost every segment of the industrial world and its stakeholders. And indeed, the same types of practices were blossoming simultaneously in various regions of the industrial world; thus, one can observe that Dr. Penny Burns, one of the pioneering figures of our discipline, was then reaching very similar conclusions on behalf of the New Zealand government as early as 1984, in the context of her public infrastructures’ revalorization project. One could therefore assert that Asset Management now relies on precise and rigorous concepts, and has been validated by empirical achievements. In order to shine a light on both of these central aspects, the following volume will be structured in a matrix organization, setting as its abscissa axis the different phases of the asset’s life cycle and, as its ordinate axis, the theoretical and conceptual factors that impact these phases. This structure will simultaneously allow us to highlight the degree to which Asset Management is a transverse discipline, diffuse at every level of entrepreneurial organizations.
A Favorable Climate for the Emergence of a Practice
In order to understand the rising interest of the corporate and scientific communities towards the mechanisms of Asset Management, one must perceive how this evolution has occurred within a very specific economic and normative context. Indeed, the consequences of the 2008 financial meltdown have been profoundly disruptive. Between 2008 and 2013, several thousands of industrial plants have been forced to go out of business all across Europe. Furthermore, the part of the industrial fleet that has remained active throughout Europe is only running at an average 75% of its nominal output; while this can be partly justified by the weakening of demand in times of financial crisis, it is also clearly an effect of a severe lack of technologic renewal and innovation combined with an aging of industrial assets that is beginning to have a negative impact on organizational levels of productivity and competitiveness. Indeed, after a decade of economic crisis, we can now observe with certainty that the European productive apparatus has aged in disproportional excess relative to the number of years during which the influx of investments was insufficient.
How are we to envision this issue? Schematically, it can be established that the rarefaction of investments made it impossible for organizations to renew their asset fleets up to the expressed needs, therefore allowing for a continuous degradation of the assets already in place. We are therefore faced with a situation in which a rising proportion of assets are in their mature lives as opposed to their useful lives, in addition to the effects of obsolescence that threaten every industrial organization across the world. In more technical terms, one can observe the CAPEX/OPEX ratio has fallen (CAPEX: capital expenditures; OPEX: operational expenditures). Furthermore, it should be noted that in many organizations, this ratio tends to decrease for a number of years until a consistent break in production generates a massive influx of CAPEX concentrated over one or two years.
In spite of all this, assets remain the first post of capital immobilization and therefore for the Assets Base of these organizations. In the case of international organizations in which equipment and infrastructure networks make up most of their capital, as it can be seen for production, transportation, and energy distribution TNCs, one can observe as much as 150 billion euros of capital invested solely in assets. It would therefore be unwise to neglect the real weight of these assets in the mainstream economy. Furthermore, it is crucial to learn how to manage these assets with a systemic approach, even more so in a context in which asset renewals are rarefying; otherwise, one faces the risk of witnessing an uncontrolled, and therefore potentially dangerous, aging of the assets, which would threaten to endanger the business depending on these assets. Indeed, it is the nature of Asset Management to promote and implement a culture of objectified investment (regarding the parameters at play) in which the assets’ life cycles are taken into account over their entire spans or over the course of their operators’ liability periods.
The need to standardize and make available the accumulated knowledge in order to democratize the best practices in the field of Asset Management has therefore never been so strong. But to fulfill this objective, one must be armed both with a scientific arsenal and a strong operational experience, in order to make the true sense of these “best practices” obvious and to universalize the lore. Over the course of the last few years, institutions—primarily from the Anglo-Saxon world, but today on the global scale—have strived to create a conceptual and theoretical framework for Asset Management, through the publication of standards such as the BSI PAS 55. Regarding the ISO 55000/1/2 series, it should be noted that if ISO (whose standards act as a reference in 162 countries around the world) has deemed it useful to dispense an international standard for a discipline that had only been around for 20 years, it must mean that this knowledge brings an added value that has been urgently needed in the pre-Asset Management world.
Preliminary Notes Regarding the Essay’s Layout
Asset Management may often appear to be a somewhat puzzling discipline, but it is also a noble one, in the sense that it sets out to implement a true pathway for the construction of a structure of decision-making.
As we’re well aware, any decision taken within an organization, regardless of its success, is always dependent on the action of a leader, a human agent prone to making valid, disputable, or misled decisions.
Therefore, we set the purpose of this work in the perspective of the construction of decisions, without denying in any way the vital part played by the decision-makers themselves, who remain fallible human actors and stakeholders in the Asset Management process.
Why 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.
