Asset Management Insights. Celso de Azevedo

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ