The Business Value of Best Practice Enterprise Asset Management

The Business Value of Enterprise Asset Management

Companies with large and complex physical estates—railway companies, infrastructure companies, leisure parks, NHS Trusts, for example—are challenged with maintaining complex physical environments, often spread over a wide area and exposed to the elements. These environments typically form a key part of the essential services these organisations deliver.

While they are experienced in proactively monitoring the condition and availability of their technology infrastructure, these businesses often struggle to do the same for their buildings, drainage systems, roads, car parks, bridgeworks, vegetation, embankments, gantries, and other elements of their physical infrastructure. These can impact their quality of service should there be an issue.

Let’s explore these issues in detail and understand how a best practice approach to managing them can generate significant business value.

The Challenge: Assuring the Visibility of Critical Infrastructure Assets

Any business with a significant physical estate will be familiar with the challenges of ensuring visibility into the condition of their environment. Usually, this will involve a programme of inspections, either directly or as part of a service provided by a contractor.

The challenge is ensuring that all inspections are carried out methodically and that issues are identified and flagged to engineering and maintenance teams, procurement departments, and business managers. Pressure on budgets means this must be done accurately & efficiently to ensure that minor issues don’t become big problems and to maximize the use of scarce resources.

Paper-based models or services using expensive and/or obsolete equipment can compromise the quality of an inspection regime. It can mean that a business compromises the quality of its service or exposes staff and users to significant health and safety issues.

The Solution: A Best Practice Approach to Delivering Key Infrastructure Asset Management

The most effective way to assess the condition of key infrastructure remains onsite physical inspections. As part of a scheduled assessment programme, it can confirm the physical integrity of an asset—whether a rail embankment, a warehouse, or an overhead gantry, for example—and highlight any issues that need to be monitored or fixed immediately.

Modern technology—e.g., Smartphones, GPS devices, Cloud Computing, digital automation—offers companies with large estates innovative ways to better manage the risks involved while also enhancing the productivity of skilled and experienced staff by streamlining the end-to-end monitor—fix—report workflow more efficiently and accurately.

Let’s explore what the best practice approach might look like and the business value it brings.

A Best Practice Approach to Enterprise Asset Management

Speaking with industry practitioners, a best practice approach to managing critical assets has several characteristics. At its core, it is a capability powered by a technology platform that provides powerful functionality that allows inspection teams, engineers, maintenance teams, and business managers to work together seamlessly to maintain a broad range of critical assets.

Ease of use is crucial for successfully deploying and using a platform to manage an infrastructure estate. For end users, going on-site daily typically means using smart devices that feature data and image capture, data access, and data entry. These tools should use standard smartphone functionality that users will be familiar with so they can easily record site visit details, review specific instructions, provide reports on the conditions they find, and deliver evidence of particular issues that need to be followed up.

Businesses with large physical estates, across many sectors, have many challenges in common: a diverse array of different assets, a broad geography, a critical reliance on site visits, and the need to integrate with multiple workflows. They can all benefit from a standard technology architecture to support their common needs.

However, their specific needs will be different. Some companies will have assets spread over hundreds of acres, with others having assets spread over hundreds of miles. Many will have buildings and drainage systems to manage, while others will have issues like railway embankments or vegetation management to contend with, too.

This means that a solution must be highly flexible to capture the unique nuances and requirements of specific locations and business needs without requiring complex scripting, application development, or technical skills to make it all work.

With cost management a key driver and maximising productivity of scarce resources a must, automation is a critical pillar in delivering a best practice approach.

The ideal situation is when a platform offers end-to-end automation so that all elements of the inspection process are covered, from defining the task to confirming the location and providing the inspection specification. It also ensures that detailed post-inspection reporting and imagery are made available, alongside alerting and management of any follow-up.

The Business Value of a Best Practice Approach

This approach delivers significant business to any company that needs to manage its critical assets more effectively. It uses scarce resources better so that assets can be checked when needed rather than when an issue suddenly develops. It can integrate with work scheduling tools so that inspections can be carried out when other work is also taking place on-site.

This approach also helps build a management dashboard so managers can make the right decisions at the right time with the right information. This data can also be used with digital monitoring tools to help identify the root causes of issues and ensure problems are resolved more swiftly.

Lastly, it provides an effective way to maintain key business services, whether to provide critical services to the community or as part of a customer experience that supports a business's development.

How can Pole Star Help you?

Pole Star is the leading platform for infrastructure digital inspections. We work closely with our customers to provide cutting-edge digital solutions. We are a team of asset managers, examination managers, and operators. We understand your requirements.

With over 100 years of senior-level management experience, we live and breathe asset management daily, working with and supporting our valued clients, including Network Rail and TFL. In addition to providing outstanding digital platforms, we have a first-class inspections division that utilizes our experience and robust systems.

Learn more about how we can help you.