Business Drivers

Managing Asset Information to Make Better Decisions

Focusing on Financial Issues Related to Your Operating Assets

Managing Your Assets to Manage Your Risk

Managing Your Assets to Support Your Business Strategy

What measures do you use to monitor your asset management performance?

What behaviours are they intended to drive?

With properly defined business and asset management strategy and objectives, the organization then needs to drive the behaviours to support the strategy and objectives.  Communication of the strategy and objectives is critical to drive behaviours.  Using appropriate performance measures will help to clearly communicate the strategy and objectives, and show the organization’s progress toward supporting them.  Like strategy, performance measures needed to be cascaded down through the organization to drive behaviours at the lower levels that support the overall objectives.   The work by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton on “Balanced Scorecard” has developed a system intended to drive a broader perspective of measures through the inclusion of non-financial measures that drive improvements in areas that will have a critical influence on the performance of the organization. 

Performance measures can also support continuous improvement initiatives.  If a broad set of raw data can be gathered (e.g. DCS or SCADA systems, production systems, EAMS/CMMS), trended and analysed, the co-relation between variables can be better understood, and the “ripple effect” of changes to the variables can be predicted to some degree.  With this understanding, the organization can then focus on the critical performance drivers.

Performance measures can be used to manage obligations between groups through service level agreements (SLA).  The SLA could be internal within an organization to ensure the services provided are suitable to the end-user of the service, or they could be contractual between two separate organizations (e.g. outsourced maintenance services).  Again, it is critical to ensure that the measures developed drive the desired behaviour.

Are your measures appropriate to your strategy and objectives?

Do they support the desired behaviours?