Body of Knowledge
Engineering Asset Management has matured into a professional practice through the work carried out by the international multidisciplinary community of asset management. The introduction of the ISO 5500x set of standards on Asset Management was one important milestone. The recent WCEAM 2014 conference in South African Pretoria presented excellent examples on this.
From left: Joe Amadi-Echendu, 9th WCEAM 2014 Chair, Thembelani Thulas Nxesi, Honourable Minister, Department of Public Works, South Africa and Joe Mathew, ISEAM Board of Directors & Congress Co-Chair.
Towards Engineering Asset Management Body of Knowledge and Standards is the slogan of the 9th World Congress on Engineering Asset Management (WCEAM 2014) that was held in October in South-African Pretoria, City of Tshwane. About 200 delegates comprising academics, practitioners and scientists from 20 countries attended the conference that was organized by the Graduate School of Technology Management, University of Pretoria, in cooperation with the International Society of Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM).
The topics of the congress covered private industry business concerns and issues, public sector investment and service delivery imperatives. In addition, it covered useful academic research on a wide range of Engineering Asset Management topics including investment and divestment strategies, operations and maintenance, condition and risk assessment, technologies and systems, standards, education, training and certification. WCEAM 2014 included four keynote addresses, one plenary presentation, four seminar sessions, three panel discussions and 82 paper presentations. The congress proceedings will be titled 9th WCEAM Research Papers and the book will be available in spring 2015.
ISO 55 000 as a guideline
The chairman of ISEAM, Dr. Joe Mathews declared in his opening speech that the field of Engineering Asset Management has matured into a professional practice through the introduction of the ISO 55 000 set of standards on Asset Management. While the ISO 55 000 series covers both tangible and non-tangible assets, engineering asset management encompasses all types of assets including built environment infrastructure, plant, equipment, hardware systems and components.
The Group Executive of Eskom Generation Division, Mr. Govender outlined in his speech the challenges of ageing electricity production and distribution network and highlighted how Asset Management has been applied towards mitigation. Maintenance actions and necessary midlife refurbishment have to be realized under strict funding constraints. ISO 55000 helps to align the strategic asset management plan to the corporate objectives.
For the first time in WCEAM history, a keynote speech was given by an investment banker. Andre Kruger, VP PPP Financing, ABSA Capital in his presentation discussed how to close the gap between engineering plans and financing realities. Integrated capital planning requires good insight of the socio-economic circumstances over the planning period supported by proper asset management strategies and plans. Integrated capital planning requires collaboration between engineering and financial professionals.
Andre Greaves, Auditor-General of Queensland, Australia presented in his speech lessons learned from implementing asset management in the public sector. Public infrastructure investments require significant investments and total cost of ownership can for the state be significantly greater than the acquisition cost. Sound decision-making as part of strategic asset management is needed. Many times, however, asset investment decisions in the public sector are being made without the benefit of rigorous planning. Engineers, asset managers, accountants and financial professionals need to collaborate in asset planning processes so that investment and divestment decisions are more fully informed.
The organizing committee of WCEAM 2014 wanted also to contribute to the education and training in the field of asset management. For this purpose, the conference offered six tutorial master classes and six practitioner workshops.
The topics of the tutorials addressed a broad spectrum of topics from reliability engineering, guidelines on asset management, ISO 55000 and risk-based asset management decision-making, semantic ontologies in engineering asset management, and big data analytics and cyber maintenance systems. The workshops gave insights into the application areas covering solutions for aerospace, defence, mining industry, underground utility assets, rail freight, oil and gas, and using GIS in asset management to assess risks.
Next year in Tampere!
Next year the latest developments in the field of physical asset management will be presented and discussed in Finland. The 10th WCEAM congress will take place from 28th – 30th September 2015 in Tampere. The topics of the conference include the core issues of engineering asset management, but will also bring new approaches onto the stage.
Contributions dealing with novel technologies for maintenance like robotics and industrial Internet, asset fleet management aspects and the value growth through asset management will be given particular emphasis. The conference slogan “Keep and Grow value” reminds the fact that we have to consider the whole life cycle picture of what is to be done to assets in relation to what is to be achieved from them.
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