Courtesy: ISO 55000:2014 Asset management
- Physical asset management: the practice of managing the entire life cycle (design, construction, commissioning, operating, maintaining, repairing, modifying, replacing, and decommissioning/disposal) of physical and infrastructure assets such as structures, production, and service plant, power, water, and waste treatment facilities, distribution networks, transport systems, buildings, and other physical assets. The increasing availability of data from asset systems is allowing the principles of Total Cost of Ownership to be applied to facility management of an individual system, a building, or across a campus. Physical asset management is related to asset health management.
- Infrastructure asset management expands on this theme in relation primarily to the public sector, utilities, property, and transport systems. Additionally, Asset Management can refer to shaping the future interfaces between the human, built, and natural environments through collaborative and evidence-based decision processes
- Fixed assets management: an accounting process that seeks to track fixed assets for financial accounting
- IT asset management: the set of business practices that join financial, contractual, and inventory functions to support life cycle management and strategic decision making for the IT environment.
- Digital asset management: a form of electronic media content management that includes digital assets
Enterprise asset management
Enterprise asset management (EAM) systems are asset information systems that support the management of an organization’s assets. An EAM includes an asset registry (inventory of assets and their attributes) combined with a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) and other modules (such as inventory or materials management). Assets that are geographically distributed, interconnected or networked, are often also represented through the use of geographic information systems (GIS).
GIS-centric asset registry standardizes data and improves interoperability, providing users the capability to reuse, coordinate, and share information efficiently and effectively. A GIS platform combined with information of both the “hard” and “soft” assets helps to remove the traditional silos of departmental functions. While the hard assets are the typical physical assets or infrastructure assets, the soft assets might include permits, licenses, brands, patents, right-of-ways, and other entitlements or valued items.
The EAM system is only one of the ‘enables’ of good asset management. Asset managers need to make informed decisions to fulfill their organizational goals, this requires good asset information but also leadership, clarity of strategic priorities, competencies, inter-departmental collaboration and communications, workforce, and supply chain engagement, risk and change management systems, performance monitoring, and continual improvement.