The term "Asset Management" has many meanings and interpretations. Some, like the financial interpretation, have been in use a long time. Others, like those in use in North America by the maintenance community (and I mean that in the broadest sense) are relatively new and inconsistent.
John Woodhouse has done a wonderful job describing this and showing us where Asset Management is headed. His paper:
http://www.reliabilityweb.com/art06/pas_55_01.htm is highly recommended reading to anyone who is seriously interested in Asset Management. In the UK there is some regulatory drive behind the new standard PAS-55 requiring all Electricity and Gas distributors to be PAS-55 compliant by 2008. In many ways the experience of industry in the UK and Europe has led the way for the rest of us - after all, that's where the industrial revolution really took hold. Since the UK and Europe were often the first to install extensive infrastructure assets they are also the fisrt to see those assets reach the end of their useful lives. The aging of much of their infrastructure (at least that which wasn't destroyed in WWII) has created an opportunity for to learn by experience. The rest of us tend to watch and then follow a bit later when we feel the same pain that our European cousins have already experienced and dealt with.
PAS-55 is an excellent start on this path and we'd all be well advised to at least learn about it and understand its implications. John Woodhouse's paper sets the tone nicely.
If you read it you may, like me, get the impression that we already know all that he speaks about. Well, that's true in a sense - little of it is new conceptually but it is not yet in practice in many places. What came to my mind as I read his paper was the similarity of the approach to that used in TPM, although at a much grander scale.
I'll write again on this topic.
