Asset sustainability management: expertise at the heart of asset management

Asset sustainability management is a rapidly expanding field of business. Across the world, businesses need to balance economic, social, and environmental sustainability with the need to maintain and optimize their physical assets. With successive retirements, restructuring and relocations, the memory of businesses is being lost, because part of the knowledge and knowledge disappears, making it difficult to establish the health status and performance of assets. The development of cloud software (SaaS) has paved the way for significantly improved overall management of capital intensive assets, whether infrastructure or equipment.

We have entered an era of IT decision support. Effective asset sustainability management is at the heart of new platforms and software that bring together the data needed to reduce capital and operating expenses supporting long-term strategic planning.

In addition, recent ESG regulations require reporting not only on financial performance, but on the overall environmental, social, and governance impact of companies. Integrating asset sustainability management into an ESG framework requires a holistic approach to sustainability, which takes into account the environmental, social, and governance impacts of a company's operations and asset management practices. In this way, businesses can improve their sustainability performance, strengthen their reputation, and generate long-term value for their stakeholders.

In this context, the perspective of using integrated cloud software to improve the management of assets of a company or organization seems necessary.

A new approach to sustainable asset management

By working for several years with various customers on a range of problems, some engineering experts have begun to raise interesting hypotheses for identifying and resolving degradation or chronic breakdowns on infrastructures and equipment.

One of the key issues for many customers is the difficulty of entering and using meaningful asset data in a regular or standardized form. Too often, data on various assets has been collected and reported in different ways, making it difficult to assess performance trends, compare them, and accurately assess and develop asset intervention plans. The provision of accurate and standardized data allows for data machine learning and advanced calculations. These calculations are undoubtedly a significant improvement when making decisions.

Asset sustainability experts therefore needed to use integrated data management software. They collect and use current asset data to inform current and long-term planning, taking into account safety as well as financial and environmental performance. These asset management platforms generate and use data to support monitoring, analysis, and operational decisions. It also serves to communicate relevant information and decisions more effectively at all decision-making levels.

As experts have addressed issues across sectors, it has become clear that an industry that focuses on a sustainable asset management approach to support strategic decision making is essential. Managers and operators in the field manage common operational issues while middle and senior managers need to make decisions to better plan for the acquisition and maintenance of the lifecycle of their assets.

Develop collaboration and collective intelligence

Using an asset sustainability approach involves deploying analysis results across the organization. Ideally, the outputs should be adapted to the assessment and decision-making requirements of each of the decision-making and operational levels of the company's core activities.

An appropriate ASDM (Asset Sustainability and Durability Management) platform increases the potential and effectiveness of collective intelligence from at least two different practical perspectives. Unlike regular industry platforms, a true ASDM solution must be designed and developed by the “intellectual leadership” of the sector. It should also be designed to allow the free flow of communication between users at all levels of the company - primarily the sharing of information and the search for relevant information in order to make the right decisions at the right time.

A true ASDM solution is not intended to compete with other complete information management systems used by a company (e.g.: CMMS (Computer-aided maintenance management)). The objective of this approach is to interconnect information on installations and fixed assets that are generally excluded from many asset management systems or from their performance in other information systems that are critical to decision-making. The ability to provide robust, timely, and standardized fixed asset data is an important support for any digital transformation initiative and can play an important role in a company's efforts to increase opportunities to discover and use the collective intelligence of everyone involved.

In many countries, infrastructures in various sectors of activity are aging and deteriorating. In addition, a new generation of intelligent machines (e.g., built-in sensors and IoT-based analytics capabilities) will require future scenario planning to develop asset investment strategies and identify other opportunities. Data from these tools should also be integrated into an ASDM to provide a complete and accurate picture of the asset. The near future of the state of infrastructure in the world suggests the rapid growth of a global market for services that will optimize the planning, maintenance, and management of fixed assets, in addition to improving their environmental footprint.

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