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Why Asset Management Priorities Go Unnoticed

By Daniel Stouffer

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 04Oct2010 Word count: 589 Viewed: 227 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Asset-management priorities may not be the first course of business at your next boardroom meeting. Indeed, the subject may not appear on your agenda at all. Far too often, business executives make the mistake of relegating asset management to tedious, manual and error-prone systems, surely unaware that their lack of attention could cost them in real terms. 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.

True value can only be attached to a particular item of equipment, if it is the subject of correct monitoring and management. The net efficiency of an asset is the result of its ability to perform relative to its intended purchase, together with its absolute energy efficiency. This latter metric is often overlooked, yet it has many hidden meanings.

Asset-management priorities may not be the first course of business at your next boardroom meeting. Indeed, the subject may not appear on your agenda at all. Far too often, business executives make the mistake of relegating asset management to tedious, manual and error-prone systems, surely unaware that their lack of attention could cost them in real terms. 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.

Asset-management priorities should be set in order to help discover the energy efficiency of each piece of equipment. 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. More often than not, a problem only appears upon equipment failure, with all the repercussions that could be expected. If an asset starts to consume more energy than normal and this is monitored, it can be an early 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.

For an organization to truly "own" its footprint, in environmental and societal terms, it needs to be fully aware of its actual size. 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. They fear that the business is so complex that an asset inventory would be almost impossible to complete. However, there are dedicated teams within site survey and tagging specialist organizations, who do not scare so easily. 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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