Customer and competitive pressures are leading many industrial companies to include asset management offerings among their servitization initiatives. This often involves outcome based contracts and assumption of risks by vendors. While such “value added services” are considered important for competitive differentiation and defense of market positions, most companies don’t possess the specialized knowledge and expertise to tackle the related operational, organisational and commercial challenges nor sufficient user industry understanding to adapt offerings to customer needs. Consequently many find themselves trapped in low margin or even loss making situations, adversarial customer relationships and under considerable price pressure.
Asset Management competences have traditionally included reliability engineering, maintenance strategies, methodologies and systems, contracting and incentives, management of customer relationships and cooperation as well as people related processes and technical and supervisory skills. Even as these remain important, new capabilities are nonetheless now required. With particular emphasis on data analytics and machine connectivity companies are better positioned to manage the risks and considerable opportunities offered by these contracts. Turning real time data into intelligent actions enables cost reductions while impacting key performance metrics beyond what was previously possible. This includes cost of service delivery, reduction in unscheduled downtimes, better failure forecasting, faster implementation of engineering design changes, reduced risks and overall improved resource allocation. It is these variables that drive the crucial performance to cost ratio that determines contract success and leads to contract extensions, scope expansion and higher profitability.
We help our clients design and commercialize strong asset management offerings. We work with them to build the necessary competences and knowhow, convince customers, develop projects and contracts, train site managers and staff, understand user industry and specific customer requirements. We then help them to implement advanced methodologies, integrate systems and deploy technology to boost performance and meet or exceed service level agreements and contract objectives.