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Asset management that delivers business value

By David Hart

The UK has an extraordinary and transformational ambition for its infrastructure, with many organisations preparing to deliver more investment in the next five years than they’ve delivered in the last twenty. This ambition spans the development of cleaner and more secure energy, the upgrade of our energy and transport systems, and the modernisation of our water supply. Infrastructure businesses are facing challenges their leaders and workforce have not seen before in their careers, with an imperative to: increase the size of specialist teams, deliver change at national scale and evolve their culture. 

Delivering on this ambition while managing the existing assets – such as gas pipes, electricity cables or water tanks – is at the core of every infrastructure business and using the time of skilled staff effectively is critical to success. 

We’ve seen that optimising asset management operations increases the capacity of these skilled staff, delivers cost savings, improves asset availability, helps to manage risk and offers enhanced business value.  This requires a rigorous and data-led focus on finding the right performance across availability, safety and cost in how assets are maintained. 

Newton have developed a three-stage approach to transforming performance across asset operations and maintenance:  

  1. Analysing data to find precisely which tasks are driving real operational value, which tasks cost more than they’re worth and which don’t need to happen at all. 
  2. Deeply understanding the operational processes and their link to business performance to ensure that change creates valuable capacity in the workforce and/or improves asset availability 
  3. Embedding a positive culture to risk-based decision-making to change policies and ways of working to enable organisations to evolve to meet ambitions 

“Our solutions help increase the maturity of our clients’ asset management approach, using the data that they have together with a structured approach to risk that lays the foundations for increased use of conditions-based or preventative maintenance techniques. “

David Hart, Director Newton

Newton impact

Our solutions help increase the maturity of our clients’ asset management approach, using the data that they have together with a structured approach to risk that lays the foundations for increased use of conditions-based or preventative maintenance techniques.  This improves the precision of planned maintenance tasks and increases the business value delivered by the operational workforce.   

As a result, it creates the business confidence and the workforce capacity to spend more time delivering the capital investment plan which provides the required upgrades to infrastructure that we all depend on. 

Some examples of our work with infrastructure clients and the impact delivered:  

  • An analysis of maintenance data showed that 2 out of 5 maintenance tasks last year were not completed because the asset investment plan was not linked to operational performance, costing the client over £12m p.a. in incentive payments. We saw identification and completion of tasks significantly improve when we trained crews on the process, provided visibility of the asset-risk associated to each maintenance task and helped managers support wider business initiatives. 
  • Deep operational understanding uncovered that 4-8% of failure events over a 12-month period occurred because their field teams didn’t raise a ticket to address an issue with an asset. Newton addressed this helping the organisation to create a culture where operational performance and asset health were balanced, giving the organisation confidence in preventing these issues happening again. 
  • We worked with a client and found that 55% of planned maintenance tasks were scheduled to be completed on a 12-monthly basis, often in line with recommendations from suppliers or industry ‘best practice’.  However, despite the common approach to asset maintenance, the assets had very different risk profiles.  We worked alongside the client to develop a risk-based approach to update the frequency of planned maintenance tasks and reduced total planned maintenance demand by 6%.

Newton partners with our infrastructure clients to deliver on the UK’s critical national endeavours through three core propositions:  

  • Asset Management  
  • Capital Delivery  
  • Capability Development  

If you would like to learn more about our Asset Management work in Infrastructure, please reach out to David Hart using the link below.

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David Hart