Safety, Reliability or Performance? 

High Performing Engineering Asset Cultures

GD Murphy & J Hill

Co-operative Research Centre for Integrated Engineering Asset Management (CIEAM) School of Management Queensland University of Technology

This article first appeared in Issue 1, Volume 3 of The Asset Journal

While the importance of culture in the management of engineering assets is often referred to, very few authors have taken the time to articulate precisely what an effective culture may entail. Existing work has been limited to particular industry sectors (for example, nuclear power) or single aspects of the asset management process (for example, engineering teams). The recent shift towards engineering asset management requires a broader focus and a comprehensive examination of the cultural attributes that may be demonstrated by a "world's best practice" engineering asset organisation. The goal was to develop a cultural framework that outlined the key cultural characteristics of a "world's best practice" engineering asset intensive organisation.

The traditional concerns of those dealing with the management of engineering assets typically centre around issues of asset reliability, asset utilisation and asset availability.¹ More contemporary discussions argue the need for organisations to increase operational effectiveness, revenue and customer satisfaction while further exploiting opportunities to reduce operating costs.² Mather³ in his treatment of strategic maintenance cites six elements including productivity, cost effectiveness, safety, learning, quality and environmental concerns. Collectively these elements reflect a focus by engineering asset intensive organisations on three major elements; asset safety, asset reliability and asset performance (availability, utilisation, cost minimisation). Thus framework was designed to reflect these three fundamental concerns.

However it was also a requirement that the framework be applicable across industry types, reflecting the inherent strategic concerns of any one industry. This article summarises development of a tri-partite framework of engineering asset culture. Overall we argue that the strategic requirements of the organisation, along with its asset priorities, will dictate a specific set of cultural attributes to be adopted. Suggestions of those requisite cultural attributes are provided for practitioners to consider in light of their own organisation's goals and cultures.

Engineering Asset management Cultural Framework

The development and application of the EAM cultural framework required a number of assumptions to be made. These four assumptions reflect the boundaries within which the propositions will hold true and reflect the manner in which the authors interpret the context of engineering asset management and its relationship to the wider community and related stakeholders.

One, few organisations are wholly engineering asset related, therefore in most instances the cultural framework will typically reflect a dominant organisational sub-culture.  For example, an airline may depend solely on its engineering assets to operate, but might actually consider itself to be a "customer service" driven organisation.

Two, given that EAM exists within a wider organisational context, emphasis placed on the key drivers of EAM culture will be primarily driven by the strategic direction of the organisation. Therefore the framework needed to be applicable to a range of industry sectors with their unique strategic concerns.

Three, all organisations, due to the finite nature of available resources will prioritise what are considered to be the most important outcomes of the EAM process - in simple terms, not everything can be a ‘top priority'.

Four, the EAM cultural framework must consider the entire EAM community, not singular populations such as engineering or design staff. 

In summary, the proposed EAM cultural framework reflects the concerns of all three cultural sub-components. It argues that in any one EA intensive organisation all three elements of safety, reliability and performance are likely to be of interest - and these will be reflected by a small core set of values that represent aspects of each. However, the model acknowledges that the strategic imperatives of organisations will drive some elements to have a higher priority and hence require one or two particular cultural attributes to be represented more strongly. This is reflected below in Figure 1.0 whereby the cultural components of safety, reliability and performance are located on the three axes of risk, uncertainty and competitive pressure respectively.

Figure 1. Engineering Asset Cultural Framework

References

1  W. Taylor, The use of life cycle costing in acquiring physical assets, Long Range Planning, 14(6), pp32-43 (1981)

2   C. Schuman & A. Brent, Asset lifecycle management: Towards improving physical asset performance in the process industry, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, 25(6), pp566-579 (2005)

3   D. Mather, "The maintenance scorecard: Creating strategic advantage", pub Industrial Press Inc (New York) (2005)

This article was originally printed in The Asset Journal, Issue 1, Volume 3, 2009 and formed a Paper presented at the Asset Management Council ICOMS 2009 Conference, Sydney, Australia.

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