Asset managers are often pawns in achieving an organisation’s desired balance of “cost, risk, and performance”. Put another way, when the numbers don’t add up, one or more of these three characteristics must change— but which? Two of the characteristics are readily evident and measurable, while risk is not. Achieving desired performance along with budget cuts seems seductively possible— for a while. But like gravity, the inevitable increase in risk exposure, in the form of deteriorating reliability and availability, takes hold. Like gravity and mass, reliability and availability possess inertia. Thus, by the time the impacts of budget cuts become evident, the originator has taken their bonus and left the scene of the crime, leaving a successor with the hard sell of recovery, which may take years of additional expenditure. Successful asset managers understand the importance of protecting their budget through the defensibility of every line item of expenditure. This presentation by Jim Kennedy will explore the production of a defensible preventive maintenance program as an essential core of any asset management plan. Key to this exploration is “risk and maths”, noting that it is not the task that determines the budget cost but how often the task must be done to assure desired performance.
James (Jim) Kennedy, Director, Interlogis Consulting Pty Ltd; Founding Chair and Past Sensei, Asset Management Council (Australia); and Past Member IEC TC56 – Dependability Standards.
Jim is a Mechanical Engineer with postgraduate qualifications in Risk Management and also in Maintenance Engineering and Management from Swinburne University in Melbourne. He has over 55 years’ experience in maintenance and asset management in the aerospace, rail, power, water, and defence industries.
For the last 30 years, Jim has been directly involved in asset management activities, including 9 years as Technical Director of the Maintenance Engineering Society of Australia (MESA) and 8 years as Chair and Board member of the Asset Management Council. He has authored two manuals on Reliability Centred Maintenance and Asset Management and has presented 70+ papers in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America.
Over the last 15 years, Jim has worked part-time with Australian Maritime Defence in adapting an evolving asset management discipline to a military environment with a long history. Jim’s standards activity in the IEC Technical Committee TC56 includes either new or revised standards for Reliability, Maintenance and Maintainability, Support and Supportability, Dependability Specifications, and Reliability Centred Maintenance.