Pragma
Acuity consultants have taken on the big task of helping mature the
asset management fraternity in the market by assisting various clients
with clarifying their daily asset management and maintenance challenges.
Amongst most of these clients, the common thread has been the absence
of the very basic fundamentals of asset management, resulting in assets
not being reliable or rendering sustainable results within the
companies.
“Clients often look beyond the very basics to try and
identify why their activities fail to deliver expected results. Unless
the basics are correctly implemented and executed, improvement projects
and more enhanced activities such as operational excellence will fail,”,
says Grahame Fogel, senior partner consultant.
A further
problem is that many companies do not understand the function of asset
management as it is very often seen as an unimportant quick- fix
maintenance activity. The bigger picture of managing assets over the
full life cycle, prolonging the life span of the asset and ensuring that
the desired performance of the asset is achieved over the full period,
is often not considered.
Lastly, the lack of skills is still a very big factor. Fogel says,
“We find that there is a lack of knowledge and asset management skills
from management level down to artisan level. We see it as our task to
educate management to better understand what should be happening in the
asset management department so that they can manage and support their
teams to optimise their service delivery. We train artisans in various
best practices and processes to ensure that they focus on the right
stuff, plan and schedule ahead and that their time is optimised to also
focus on improvement projects.”
Some of the clients that we have
been partnering with on at various levels of involvement include Sasol
Mining, BBM, SABCO, Anglo Coal, Tetra Pak and PJB in Indonesia.
