Running a company is already a gargantuan task and it doesn’t help that managing your company’s assets is just one of its many complicated endeavors. Should it be as complicated as you think?
Good news is there are ways to take the clunk out of the managing your assets. You can either hire a professional in Fort Myers to do it for you or use a software to automate the process. Whatever method you choose, you need to understand first the nature of the Asset Management Plan.
What is an Asset Management Plan?
According to the International Infrastructure Management Manual, an Asset Management Plan is a plan developed to manage one or more infrastructure assets by combining multi-disciplinary management techniques. The aim is to not only determine and implement the most-cost effective way of managing these assets, but to also improve services to an agreed standard of level.
Simply put, Asset Management Plans are created to identify the properties that a company owns and uses to generate income, such as facilities, land, and infrastructures. The plan is then used to determine how these properties can be optimized for more income or check whether a company is actually losing money from the property and therefore, would have to let it go.
What are the main objectives of an Asset Management Plan?
An Asset Management Plan has two main objectives. One is to justify the benefits of keeping an asset, therefore the need to uncover the costs and the benefits that an asset provides. Second is to determine how to minimize the expenses that comes with keeping an asset, including its maintenance, operation, and even its disposal.
What are the areas covered in an Asset Management Plan?
A typical Asset Management Plan covers several areas, but the most important ones are the following:
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Defining the asset and its standard service.
Identifying the challenges is the first step. What are the problems that the asset system needs to reduce or eliminate? Why does the company have these assets in the first place and are there already procedures in place to maintain and improve these assets? The plan also needs to identify the current state of the asset and identify the Standard of Service, or the current level of service that the asset offers (like the current output of a factory).
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Determining the asset’s current performance and creating the action plans
In order to know how to improve, there is a need to determine how an asset is currently performing. This information may contain data such as the owner of the assets, the infrastructure or facility’s age, the remaining life of the asset, etc.
From there, the plan can then enumerate action plans needed to get from point A to B, point A being the current condition, and point B as the goal (improved profits, efficient operations, etc.). These are near-term actions and formulated to create a road map that will connect the current situation with the intended function in the future.
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Determining the costs and benefits and then applying cost-effective management
The costs are where careful data archiving and ledger management would come in. Every cost that involve the asset, from maintenance to operation should be revisited and updated for the next three years. From here, the plan can determine the benefits of keeping the asset and help the stakeholders decide whether to keep it around or not.
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Applying the long-term solutions
Such is the ultimate goal of a plan, to determine the most cost-effective solutions and then applying the long-term solutions for improvements. The improvements may not only result in changes with the standard of services and procedures, they can also ultimately lead to the disposal of an asset system.
An Asset Management Plan may have other contents needed to comply with local requirements but in the end, its main objective is to provide a system of benchmarking and improvement for a company. An asset management firm can help you draft the plan for your company.
