The Converging Worldviews of Asset Maintenance
When I graduated, I received my Bachelor’s degree in Accounting. All through college I was taught that an asset was a “thing” that had value. We put it on the books and depreciate it over its useful life so that we could eventually replace it. Beyond asset classes to define depreciation formulas and useful life, we really did not pay much attention to the specifics of each asset.
In my personal life, those same things are not assets, but investments. As such, they get a lot of my attention. My car, for example, gets serviced every 5k miles. Preventive maintenance is the key to having a reliable vehicle that gets me where I need to go when I need to get there. The house, the car, the pool, the yard – they all get routine maintenance designed to maintain or increase their value.
As I talk to more people, it is increasingly apparent how those two views are converging in the business world. More and more, a company’s assets are being analyzed for their ROI. And when you start down that path, the maintenance of the asset to increase the value or increase the useful life becomes that much more important.
Unfortunately, too many of today’s software solutions are not prepared to merge the two concepts. I know your financial system can track value and depreciation of an asset, but can it track and manage preventive maintenance on that asset? Or can your maintenance solution calculate and apply costs as part of the value of the asset? Can your HCM solution identify skilled craftsmen in your organization who have been trained and certified on maintaining a piece of equipment, or with handling hazardous materials? If the answers are “no”, maybe it is time to take another look at your systems because you are losing ground to your competitors.
Questions or comments, especially as they might relate to PeopleSoft ALM/Maintenance Management, an integrated system that can do all of the above? Please contact me.
###
More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
