Asset management and governance: analysing vehicle fleets in asset-intensive organisations

For physically asset-intensive organisations asset management processes and intervention strategies are considered a crucial element, as there is heavy reliance on optimal performance of assets in order to maximise organisational performance and business goals. There is a tendency for traditional asset management practices to concentrate on the engineering or operational performance of the assets, taking for granted governance factors which views asset management through organisational-level lens. Asset governance is a radically new way to view ownership and management of assets in a competitive and deregulated market, an innovative solution to meet the regulatory and increasingly competitive challenges faced by modern utility companies. Asset fleets provide a relevant and important context to investigate the interaction between engineering and governance views on asset management as fleets have distributed and system characteristics. This paper investigates how engineering and governance perspectives of asset management can be reconciled and integrated to enable optimal asset and organizational performance. Preliminary findings of a pilot study identifies issues in asset management process and localized understanding of governance within different organization divisions as the main challenges in asset management-asset governance integration.