Asset intensive industries always thrive to align their asset investments decisions with corporate strategic goals. Here the business challenge would be to priorities asset projects, effectively plan and manage these projects with constraint like time, budget, resource, and risk. Manage the operation and maintenance of asset after deployment and gauge impact on overall strategic initiative.
Capital portfolio and project management is one of key pillar of enterprise asset management (EAM). The other key pillars of EAM are asset operation and maintenance, asset visibility and performance measurement and environment health and safety. Here in this blog I am mainly talking about Capital portfolio and project management.
With integral EAM processes and efficient portfolio and project management, you can reduce cost major capital investment projects and keep ROA high . You can assess opportunities, projects, loss of production due to planned and ongoing maintenance and make informed decision to keep your initiatives aligned with corporate goals. Simple example would be Oil and Gas Industry wants meet annual increase in production goal with capacity expansion projects, planned shutdowns and unplanned maintenance projects.
Asset Portfolio Management:
One of the biggest challenges for asset intensive companies to determine:
- How to assess new investment opportunities with planned operation and maintenance projects with unplanned shutdowns
- How to take confident decision on capital distribution, planning and prioritizing of different initiatives or projects.
- How to showcase and measure asset investments against strategic goals.
Asset Portfolio management helps to integrate portfolio level finance and capacity planning with project level planned and actual. Evaluation like ROA, ECV, simulations and scoring model helps portfolio manager to define and set priorities. Project can switch different stages of asset like proposal to investment to operation and maintenance. This allows having different type of governance or business processes applied for single project. Capital budget can be defined at highest level in portfolio where business has visibility on fund availability. Budget can distributed top-down versus planned expenditure from project level can be rolled up at portfolio level. Portfolio Manager has full visibility in project process from proposal to operation and maintenance.
Initiatives can be used to bring together different but related capital expenditure, O&M and proposal projects to manage and control overall program.
Asset Project Management:
Successful installation and commissioning of asset requires completing the undertaken project within various constraints like budget, time, resources, etc. Project management integrates and manages different business processes with greater visibility and collaboration. You can effectively monitor internal and external engineering, procurement, stocks, other logistic process, and outgoing payments during project life cycle. Work breakdown structure network activities enable detail cost planning, time scheduling and resource planning. Various cost planning methods can be used to accurately calculate the cost involved in project. Project structure can be used to define involvement of external OEMs and EPC contractors. Effective communication and collaboration with external service providers and vendors lead to better project control.
Project Management is integrated with Portfolio management to show planned verses actual in real time. This enables project and portfolio manager to take informed decisions.
Enterprise project connector enables complex project scheduling with Primavera or other project planning tools. You can incorporate actual progress in project by having field inputs against project activities.
Operation and Maintenance projects can be managed with WBS structure and integration of the same with plant maintenance orders. Maintenance order can be effectively planned and executed in plant maintenance whereas cost and overall timeline can be controlled from project management.
Resource Management:
Resource management is used to plan and utilize company-wide capacities across different capital investment projects and O&M projects. Human resource system can be integrated with resource management system to pull resource data like location, availability, skill and qualification. You can plan resources based on their suitability with project and maintenance orders. Resource management solution brings transparency in demand and resource planning and increases profitability by reducing non-productive time.
Resource management manages internal as well external resources to meet the resource requirement from project, plant maintenance and field services. Resource planner can centrally overview all demand and resource utilization to plan the resources optimally. You can plan human resources as well as production resources tools against demand with resource management.
Asset information management:
Once new asset put into operation you need to ensure that you have complete, accurate and accessible information for operation and maintenance of asset. Effective Document management system and collaboration with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can help us have documents in system electronically. You can start collaboration with EPC contractors to collect information relevant for procurement and operation and maintenance of equipment.
Business Benefits:
- Optimize portfolio performance by managing projects more effectively and enforcing enterprise wide governance. Better decision making based on transparent information and real time status.
- Timely project completion with lower cost and optimum resource utilization. Improved project monitoring with budget versus actual and progress tracking against time schedule.
- Reduced risk by setting up right priorities, planning and monitoring projects, close collaboration with vendors and contractors