Developing Strategic Asset Management Plans (SAMPs) is an essential – but often misunderstood – part of asset management.  SAMPs go by several different names (AM Strategy, AM Standard etc), but they’re simply about a business making a set of decisions about what “success” looks like in terms of gaining value from its assets and how they’ll go about achieving these objectives. 

The benefit of SAMPs is best understood by seeing what happens when they’re not in place.  Over the years, Bluefield has worked with many clients whose objectives are misaligned to the point that they destroy value.  Production and maintenance might have KPI’s that are in conflict, and so might planning, reliability and engineering teams.  Finance teams might be trying to cut inventory as maintenance superintendents are screaming blue murder.  When this happens, the resulting conflict can make it almost impossible to succeed. 

Even worse, an organisation might be focussed on completely wrong goals.  We’ve seen businesses prioritise planning and scheduling metrics over availability, or focus on reducing maintenance costs to the extent that they harm long term performance.  We’ve also seen businesses fail to respond appropriately to changes in their business context, such as the commodity price cycles that affect the mining industry, or new and emerging technologies. 

A strategic asset management plan helps businesses avoid these traps, ensuring they’re focussed on the right goals, performing the right activities, and making the right resources available to support their teams.  There’s no single way to build a SAMP – it’s about each business deciding what’s right for them.  Whether it’s a single plan on a page, or a comprehensive strategy, SAMP’s start by working out the business’ objectives, supported by discussions on: 

• Context – what’s happening inside the business and in the broader industry and community? 
• Scope – what assets does the business control, and how does the AM team interact with other parts of the business? 
• Requirements of internal and external stakeholders 

Once the objectives are clear, the team can set targets and assess where its gaps are.  The targets and gap analysis enable the team to plan both short and long-term actions to close performance gaps, improve its processes and capabilities, and achieve its goals.  Importantly, this is where a SAMP stops – it’s not about going down to individual assets or specific processes (these can be built separately through asset management plans). 

Bluefield’s team of asset management specialists can help clients through the process of building a strategic asset management plan.  We can engage leadership and frontline teams in workshops to gain consensus on high-level objectives and targets, as well as identifying performance gaps.  We can also provide our pre-existing Bluefield templates to help speed up the process of building the plans and moving ahead to implementation.  Most important is our number one aim, which is to ensure you, the client, owns and implements the plan and not Bluefield. 

Bluefield’s specialists have many years of experience in working at all levels of an organisation, from the leadership team to the shop floor.  We understand how to build plans that can be implemented by teams, and can provide coaching and other assistance for leaders who have to ensure progress is being made. 

If you’re looking for support from a partner who can help you built a lasting pathway to getting more from assets, please contact Bluefield today.