Asset Data Management Summary - E65

[00:00:01] Lee: A summary episode of our discussions related to asset data management. Hello, thank you for joining us. This is what counts. A podcast created by Trailblazer Consulting. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company. We share our experience solving information management challenges like creating and implementing a records retention schedule, creating an asset data hierarchy, or helping with email management. This is Lee, and in this episode, Maura and I will provide a summary on asset data management. [00:00:36] Maura: Can you believe this is our 10th episode talking about asset data? Shocking. But we could go on. We could go on for many more hours. Diving into individual aspects of how do you find the right ID, how do you find the assets? How do you assign value to your assets from a revenue generation perspective? So a lot of different places we could go, but I think this has been a really good overview. And, so I just wanted to do a summary since ten episodes is a lot to keep track of. I thought it would be a great idea if we just kind of ran through what the previous episodes talk about and give our listeners a high level start to finish. This is what we mean when we talk about an asset data management program. Sound good? I see you nodding. [00:01:29] Lee: That sounds like an excellent idea. [00:01:33] Maura: All right, so first thing, high level introduction. We talked about why asset management, why asset data management? And the thing about asset data management is that it has to follow your asset management strategy. You are an infrastructure heavy, asset heavy organization. You're a public utility, or you're a university with a lot of buildings or something else where you have a lot of physical assets that you need to worry about. You're building new things, you're maintaining them. You're worrying about the revenue that's coming out of them, people using them, your customers, your students. So first think about your asset management strategy and how does that link to your overall business strategy? Are you looking to grow? Are you just trying to maintain? Do you just have a public responsibility, just a public responsibility to provide safe drinking water? All of those things are part of informing your asset management strategy. Second thing related to your asset management strategy is the financial side of this. Assets are expensive. They're expensive to build, they're expensive to maintain. Are they directly contributing to your revenue or are they adding to your value in an indirect way? So is it cost of goods sold means you have manufacturing equipment and all the manufacturing is part of that? Or is it that you are running an airport and you have commercial spaces and you're making money off the rent, you're making money off the gate rental from the airlines. But buildings that are sort of support and maintenance buildings outside of the terminal don't directly contribute to your revenue. Those are decisions that you and your organization can make and there's no right or wrong answer, but whatever the answer is, that's part of your asset management strategy. So that's the first thing. We kind of covered that in our episode one as well later in a discussion around revenue generation and financial calculations. Second big thing is you as an asset manager are defining your asset maintenance approach. Do you have a run to fail approach where you're not investing at all, you're just waiting and then you're going to do replacement that you can get money for capital, but you can't get money for maintenance, so you just let it go until it's time to replace it? Or are you trying to optimize the life and the value of your assets so you want to maintain them in tip top form and you want to be right on top of the just in time maintenance and inspections? Or are you trying to be cutting edge? Are you Disney World and trying to set up the best new fun thing for people to come and see? So you have to have an AI suite or you have to have a virtual reality suite to add to the other assets you already have in place. Again, your business objectives are going to help drive your maintenance approach and then your asset data approach needs to provide you the data to do those things. So we had an episode early on about defining assets, defining them so that you can have as each asset object, something you can add data to, you can report on, you can track the condition, you can manage parts and maintenance of it, you can add a work order to it. And we suggested in that episode, you look at what's the value of the asset, there's a minimum value that it's worth tracking. You might want to look at the need to report on an asset. You might have to report performance or report emissions or some other regulatory requirement or an internal policy requirement where the CEO really wants to know if the escalators are always working or not. You might also think about the need to fault or perform a corrective action. Like if light bulbs go out, do you need to know where all the light bulbs are? Or do you need to know where all the lights are? Or do you just need to know that there's lights out on the third floor hallway and that's close enough and you have to decide in your asset definition what's that right level so that you can quickly find the problem and fix it. Then we talked about IDs, and this one is the hardcore data piece here because you have assets that are managed in a lot of different systems, they're tracked in a lot of different systems and they end up with different IDs. So from all of the different examples that we've given over time. You have say, a development company, a renewable energy development company in particular is who we worked with. And so they had a project database where the first thing they did was identify the opportunity by a project name or number. And sometimes that project got three or four names because they were trying to be clever or they purchased it from someone else and changed the name. They might have named it geographically or they might have named it as a code name. You never know. Second thing then is once you've gone from the idea of this opportunity to when you're starting to actually put things in the ground is you have a survey or you have land markers and you say, well, this is the northeast region or this is the southwest corner of this county, and you name it that way. And you have boundaries and other identifiers that are about the geography. Then you get to, okay, it's a wind farm and this is how we're going to lay out the turbines, and each turbine is going to have its own asset ID inside of that geography, that land mass that you've created and they're still linked to that project, but you also need to link them to the owners. What internal entity are you using to run that project? Do you have one for building and then one for operations? Who did you buy it from? Because there's a lot of infrastructure changing hands in many industries and they all brought their own IDs in. So you end up with a lot of different systems where every different ID is talking about actually the same physical things in the field, but they're all coming at it from a different perspective. And in order to effectively report on that data or calculate on that data or bring that data together to give you a picture of your asset base, you need to know how do those asset IDs match up? Which ones are going to be the source of truth? Which ones do you want to report on for financing versus for maintenance? And a data model can help you track how the data is flowing across all the systems. [00:08:15] Lee: We did mention that in one of our episodes. Not trying to create a unique ID string that takes all of those definitions and places them all together in one big barcode. That's not the approach that we're targeting here. [00:08:32] Maura: That's a really good point, Lee. Thank you. Because that idea of a meaningful name or a meaningful ID, that's really a very old school thing from when you didn't have good databases that allowed you to different keyword searches or different metadata tags on your records. So a lot of metadata on your asset record, metadata on your contract, records on your finance project records, or capital budget records. And you can match up that metadata without creating a long string of characters that someone has to remember what each section means. So perfect segue to our next item, which was following the data and finding the assets. And we actually spent two episodes on this because first you've got to trace how did this asset go through all the systems, what are all the different IDs that it has and how do you want to match them up? So we're working with a company right now that's a midstream pipeline company, and they've got one system of record for managing all of their pipelines, and they've got another one for managing all of their facilities. And they've pretty much aligned those two for active assets. There are some inactive assets that may or may not be in those systems, but then you've got the trading side, the financial side of the house from a midstream perspective. And they are calling locations something else because they are looking at not only their own locations but also their trading partner locations. And they are naming them to meet two needs in the trading world. One is delivery, actually sending product back and forth, whether it's through a pipeline or through some other transport mechanism. So they've got to know exactly where to go to get stuff from one place to another. And then the second thing is around operational taxes, sales and use taxes with the transport of these products from one place to another, they're incurring some different taxes. On the asset based side, when we're talking from the engineering place, they're concerned about taxes from a property tax perspective and depreciation for the capital investment. But in the trading space, these same locations have sales and use taxes that they have to worry about. So they created a different location structure from the engineering one. And one of the challenges facing them now is matching those up because there's data that needs to go between the two, particularly contract data, where you have the contracts that created these assets and that are maintaining them, and you have the contracts that are underlying the trade agreements. So it's an interesting challenge. Just one more aspect of that. Follow the data, and the second piece of it is find the assets. What is where so where are all the motors? You know, you bought 50 of them. Where did you put them and how do we find them and where? I think, Lee, you mentioned earlier about one of our clients talking about maintenance and how long it took to find some things. And I know I've mentioned that one of the airports we worked at, there were 20,000 assets in their asset register. From the maintenance perspective, that just said South Terminal. And South Terminal was six stories above ground. And so 20,000 assets just in South Terminal. From a financial perspective, okay, but from a maintenance perspective, if you have to go fix something, that's an all day affair to go find that thing. So then we started going deeper and we started talking about the parts and the equipment that you need to keep your assets up and running. Gaskets, bolts, filters, how often do you need to change those out and how do you manage that whole inventory and replenishing it and keeping track of the costs related to it? Which took us to our final piece in our last episode before this one, which is about the financial aspects of asset management and asset data management, calculating depreciation and taxes on fixed assets, making repair and replace decisions based on cost to run, cost to repair. How many times has something failed? Are you reaching the end of its life and having good data to support your decision making process? So we've covered a lot over these ten episodes around asset data, and I for one, would love to hear from any listeners who have questions about it or can tell us good stories. But I hope that this has been a useful journey. I know that we've enjoyed it. That's my wrap up. [00:13:19] Lee: No, that was excellent. I appreciate that tremendously. Data, data everywhere is what I got to say. Also, all of this, pulling this all together is just to get that one dashboard and that one report that that one guy asked for. No, I'm just kidding. But I think we threw that in there, too, is how to get that one report that covers everything, all of your assets and how they're operating and so forth. [00:13:47] Maura: Okay, I'm not wrapped up. I'm going to add something about dashboards. We have a lot of clients on the business side or the finance side that are like, I just need a dashboard. How hard is that? Just send me a dashboard with some dials and some graphs. And that requires so much data work behind the scenes, which I love. But understanding the value of the data work to get to the dashboard is an interesting challenge when we're talking to new clients. [00:14:18] Lee: I absolutely agree. [00:14:20] Maura: The dashboard is only as good as your asset data. [00:14:25] Lee: If you have any questions, please send us an email at [email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. Thank you for listening and please tune into our next episode. Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network. As always, we appreciate you, the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake, who created our music. Thank you. *TrailBlazer does not disclose client confidential information. Speakers may reference well-known companies or organizations as examples; such references rely solely on publicly available information.