By Domenic Fonte - CEO, AssetFuture
The adoption of digital technology in the asset management industry is on the rise. Digitisation in the AM sphere essentially involves the use of integrated digital systems to automate management functions and generate insights from data.
Digitisation affords many benefits for asset management professionals, such as:
Speed and efficiency: reduction of hours spent on manual administration by utilising mobile technology.
Predictive maintenance: more accurate maintenance planning through AI and ML detections of asset degradation and failures.
Cost savings and budget confidence: using automation and evidence-based decision making to save costs and empower AM providers.
With a more accurate maintenance schedule, efficiencies are not only gained from carrying out routine checks or maintenance that aren’t needed, but also from avoiding much more expensive, critical failures, resulting in unplanned downtime.
Digital asset management is a better fit for future assets. New buildings will need to operate efficiently, requiring higher usage and less downtime. They will also need to be more flexible, adaptable and sustainable, with use cases evolving as paradigms shift.
Most new buildings will have new technologies enabling digital twins embedded into them, such as BMS building analytics, smart sensors and connected IoT devices. These can directly plug into a digital AM system enabling alerts in real-time. For example, HVAC systems can be optimised to reflect the number of people within a particular area in real-time. This not only creates the best environment for those individuals, but optimises the lifecycle of the asset.
While digitisation presents exciting possibilities for asset management, there are still some challenges to wider adoption.
Obtaining quality data: existing data may be outdated, siloed in disparate sources, incomplete or inaccurate. Getting new data for existing buildings can also be time consuming and expensive. Asset modelling is one possible solution, where if you have a repeatable space - such as a learning spaces, hospital wards or bathrooms - you can replicate its data. AI tools can also help clean up data and fill in missing values by using an existing comparable set.
Organisational Alignment: with any new technology there’s often a lack of understanding among decision-makers about how it works and why it will benefit an organisation. Board/C-Suite reluctance to invest can be a also be a challenge. Traditional reactive maintenance requires less initial investment and thus tends to be the default industry approach. Champions of digitisation will need to educate the benefits of a whole-of-life approach to key decision makers.
Cultural shift: digital asset management involves a new way of working and thinking about assets. It’s a big change for teams who may have been accustomed to legacy systems and are resistant to learning new technology and processes. Change is led from top down, with the executive leading the way, however collaboration and buy-in across an entire organisation is essential to success.
Focussed Planning: from time-to-time alignment and cultural awareness promotes digitisation, however, if a clear plan does not exist which articulates why, who and how a digitisation journey will be executed, time and cost blowouts will likely result in program failure.
InfoSec: with information security, there’s a need to build networks that are smart but extremely secure. Technologically connected buildings are already being targeted by hackers trying to disrupt critical systems. This also means choosing partners – e.g. technology platforms and cloud providers - that ensure the highest-grade security.
Digitisation represents a huge opportunity for the industry. New technologies and the rise of automation are accelerating the progress already made over the past decade. The next decade will present a significant transition to a completely digital world of smart, connected buildings with real-time data enabling predictive maintenance and optimal asset lifecycles.
Domenic Fonte - CEO, AssetFuture