Seminar - Nooshin Jabiri - Holistic Asset Management- A new approach to strategic management of asset intensive organizations

Wednesday, April 12, 2006, 1.10 - 1.50 pm
Civil Engineering Lecture Theatre 3

Abstract
In the current competitive environment, one of the key challenges facing manufacturing organizations is transformation so as to be able to face global competition, based on customer needs and market dynamics. There is an apparent dichotomy in the sense that capital intensive assets are normally long term and fixed while customer needs and preferences are short term and driven by market dynamics. How to reconcile the long-term nature of Asset Management (AM) and short-term nature of customer needs and preferences requires a sophisticated approach to capital-intensive assets. The challenge is to find ways to reconcile these differing perspectives.

This seminar focuses, on the need, importance and outcome of this research and the associated activities. It starts with an overview of asset management in the context of manufacturing industry and the need for reform. It briefly reviews the AM literature in this context and identifies the gaps both in current AM framework and the decision support systems. Subsequently, it explains the research hypothesis and opportunities to solve the problems.

The seminar introduces a new strategic AM framework referred to as Holistic Asset Management. The framework goal is to identify and streamline AM key drivers to link investor’s expectations and customer values to asset capabilities, in an effective manner. The concept is developed into a management and decision-support system, named Integrated Asset Management System (IAMS), which will provide responsible managers with meaningful information on the status and performance of their assets and means for exploring how future demands and management policies may influence asset performance in a multi-dimensional space.