Asset Operations Management: Measure the Why, Not the What

After showing what Asset Operations Management means for maintenance, reliability, and operations teams, we decided it was time to dig deeper. For the next few weeks, we’ll outline the eight pillars of Asset Operations. These are the core ideas behind the larger concept, and they’ll provide a better understanding of what Asset Operations truly encompasses.

So far we’ve covered:

• Pillar 1: Maintenance, Reliability, and Operations Must Operate Together and Be Aligned on Achieving a Common Goal

• Pillar 2: Data Must Flow Into a Single Repository

Today we’re covering Pillar 3: Measure Teams Based on Why They Do Something Rather Than What They Do. 

Where We Are Today

In our other content on Asset Operations Management, we’ve discussed the pitfalls of dividing work into three separate teams. The main pitfall being maintenance, reliability, and operations professionals are stuck in a cycle of being undersupported, undervalued, and misunderstood. What do we mean by that? 

Undersupported, Undervalued

Today’s employees are undersupported by the technology in their workplace. Employees lack systems that make their days, lives, and jobs easier. 

Budgets are also misinformed. We’ve talked to many people in the industry, and we learned that the most common way to determine maintenance budgets is by a percentage of total replacement asset value. But really there’s little rhyme or reason as to why. How do we know if we have the right amount of financial resources allocated to maintenance if we’re using an incomplete formula to decide?

Teams Are Misunderstood

We’ve talked about teams being undersupported and undervalued, but what we’re also seeing is teams being misunderstood. These teams are measured by what they do, not why they do it.

In our State of Maintenance 2021 report, we saw that the number one goal for businesses was to reduce downtime. But then we also asked the question, “How do you measure the success of your maintenance team?” 47% of respondents answered “completed preventive maintenance.” 

Organizations, through this KPI, are tracking what technicians are doing rather than the outcome of the hard work, which is ultimately reducing downtime. It’s clear there’s a big disconnect between what matters to businesses and what’s measured on a day-to-day basis.

What will happen if this continues? If teams continue to be undersupported, undervalued, and misunderstood, company leadership will continue to see these teams as cost centers, restarting the cycle that led us to where we are today.

Shifting the Industry’s Mindset

We can shift the industry’s position of three different departments with three different goals with three different ways of tracking their success, to one team working on your asset’s operations together to achieve a common goal.

This is called Asset Operations Management–where you’re managing the entire asset life cycle, where comprehensive data metrics and success is measured by business outcomes not how many hours you’ve worked.

In an Asset Operations Management system, cost, revenue, and asset data is combined, making it easy to access, centralizing all of it, and unifying it, so all teams can work together to support business outcomes. If you implement not just this system but the thinking, a team moves from interacting with an asset from a repair/production perspective to thinking about the asset across its entire life cycle and one’s role in that life cycle. 

What happens next is an employee starts thinking about data differently like, “what does a comprehensive asset health plan look like?” Suddenly, success shifts from how much one got done today to how much did one impact the business. It’s a huge shift. Now every person is thinking about their work and contribution in a new way rather than simply turning a wrench.

The Next Generation of Maintenance, Reliability, and Operations

Asset Operations Management combines both cost and revenue data and brings it to the forefront, so leaders can look past what teams are doing and instead focus on their impact. It changes the conversation from “how many hours did you work today?” to “this is the value you’ve added to the business today.”

We want to change the conversation from success being measured by tasks and completion rate to outcomes and ROI. The next generation of work is possible, and it starts with all of us. 

For more on Asset Operations Management, check out:

• What Asset Operations Management Means for Maintenance Teams

• What Asset Operations Management Means for Reliability Teams

• What Asset Operations Management Means for Operations Teams