As an infrastructure owner, how do you maintain your infrastructure? Is to maximise the bottom line for your business? Do you 'work it' as much as you can and then fix it when it breaks? Or do you fix it regularly but don't really know when to build new? How do you know when you are hitting the proverbial nail on the head, ensuring that your maintenance regime is maximising your businesses bottom line?
Let’s try to paint the picture using our own lives. We make life impacting decisions all day, day to day...Should I exercise? Should I have that healthy salad? Should I get my 7 hours sleep per night? Should I go for that doctor’s annual checkup? And you do this every day, all day, for your entire life.
The problem however with taking any sort of action on this is that even though each does affect how long you live, it requires effort, knowledge, money and time to arrive at a decision. Also, you, are part of a more complex system; you and your wife’s monthly budget, varying time needs for members of your family, the dog that needs to walk, the medical savings account that cannot get maxed out. So, what does you do? How do you balance the one side against the other side, the cost vs impact, the risk vs reward?
Well if you are the owner of an infrastructure asset heavy business, as with life, you need see your infrastructure as part of a more complex system. Now, the word system here is important, so let’s define what it is, well at least one definition of what it is.
ISO 15288:2008 probably provides the simplest definition of a system: "A combination of interacting elements organised to achieve one or more stated purposes."
Where we speak of a business that own infrastructure, the elements are your people, processes and technology, and the purpose is using these to earn income and to make profit. This means that if your infrastructure (aka technology) breaks down, it stops doing what it was intended to do. This infrastructure may be your access road allowing your supply chain to reach your factory, your potable water system providing water so you can wash down your conveyors daily and meet daily production targets, or your building performance management system that monitors your green building performance, and in that way retaining your green accreditation. In all of these there is potential to stop earning revenue.
The critical point here is that because your infrastructure is part of your complex business system, you don’t want to necessarily only work your infrastructure asset to maximise the life of any one infrastructure asset, neither do you wish to overspend on maintenance, as it has an impact on the system and therefore your bottom line. The way to balance the system and to maximise the profit, is to treat your infrastructure asset management as a system, and thus, a subsystem, of your business.
Therefore, a solid well balanced asset management system is the only way to maximise the benefit that your infrastructure provides you: in selecting the correct timing, extent and duration of your planned maintenance window, you can ensure that you maximise your bottom line. ISO55000 provides guidance for all asset owners on this.
Remember, each asset has a very different asset management plan. Civil assets such as roads, storm water systems and buildings, have significantly longer life than mechanical and electrical components, such as pumps and HVAC systems, and need to be maintained less regularly, but have significantly large upfront costs. Also, you will always need to do some kind of unplanned maintenance, as we live in the real world. As with life, accidents happen and infrastructure breaks. There is risk of you damaging your high value infrastructure in the long term if you do not undertake a sound asset management approach, which affects the not only your income streams but also the overall value of your business.
So treat your infrastructure as you treat yourself. Look after it and you will reap the rewards.
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