17 April 2014

Ross Agnew, Costain’s Director of Technology Solutions, recently presented at the ICE’s Infrastructure Asset Management Conference 2014, which laid out the challenges facing the industry in delivering higher capacity assets that are cost effective, integrated and sustainable.

Delegates heard how these assets need to be future proof and offer the best possible return on investment. More crucially, these assets need to be delivered against a backdrop of tightening budgets as the UK Government looks to cut costs to the tune of 15%.

Delegates also heard how projects like the Olympics and Crossrail have proved that better planning reduces costs and makes projects more efficient, and how construction leaders have been encouraged to manage their funds more actively.

Sharing a platform that included Graham Dalton, the Chief Executive of the Highways Agency and Lawrence Gosden, Thames Water’s Asset Director, Ross described the asset management approach that has been recently enshrined in the ISO55000 Standards and asset intelligence, which focuses on aligning asset performance with how assets are used and how they can create value.

Ross outlined a roadmap from asset management to asset intelligence based on a model that is founded on data and focuses on the interventions that asset owner operators make during an asset’s lifecycle.

“As the emphasis moves towards asset management, it is critical that asset owning operating businesses focus on the value that assets deliver and not just the management of information. The model we have developed creates a framework to ensure that asset decisions are always made within the context of the value that they deliver, which provides a route map to asset intelligence,” said Ross.

The model is currently being developed as a ‘White Paper’ that will be available to the asset management community later this year. Other presentations covered intelligent assets, the interface between Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Asset Management and how a number of asset owner operators are approaching asset management.

Ends