Managing Strategic Engineering Assets in the 21st Century: A Life Cycle Perspective to Manage Risks

Industrial facilities/assets worldwide have been in continuous change process over a number of years. The ongoing transformations are often attributed to technologically-aggressive, customer-oriented, and market-intensive strategies, where profit margins often remain at the centre of focus of business operations. With the current concerns on more global scale and complex operational conditions, the conventional drivers of competitive advantage have largely been challenged. Besides, network-based, knowledge-intensive societies and partnership-based cooperative economies, have already re-defined asset management excellence. This implies that the success relies heavily on a different set of attributes of business exposure and external demands, and thus the need to be more cautious about novel set of risks in making business decisions. In fact ?now' is the time to break the tradition and to plan for the future to mitigate hidden business risks in a complex, vulnerable, and a rapidly changing environment. The questions are then, what are these hidden risks, what issues are critical for strategic assets to mitigate those hidden risks, how to prepare for the future through a risk-aversive value-creating roadmap, how to operationalize forward-looking actions, and what can be learnt from the best players in other industries to secure long-term growth while maintaining good profitability.

This paper brings these issues into discussion in detail through various examples, challenging and setting a road-map for strategic asset management to identify the hidden risks and to capitalize on the value-potential of complex business activities in a sustainable perspective.

Biosketch: Dr. Liyanage is a Professor of Industrial Asset Management at the Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Stavanger, Norway. He earned his Ph.D. in Offshore Engineering (specializing in Asset Operations and Maintenance) from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2003. Dr. Liyanage has done extensive work in the sustainable asset management area, collaborating with several companies in Norway (for example joint projects with Conco Phillips, Eni Norway, Petrolink, Gassco, AGR, Seimens Turbomachinery AB). He is an honorary founding fellow of the International Society for Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM), a member of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) special working group on ?Advanced maintenance engineering, Services, and Technology, Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and an honorary fellow of the International Foundation for Research in Maintenance (IFRIM). He is the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Strategic Engineering Asset Management and is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing. He has published extensively in reputed international journals, delivered keynote speeches and presented at numerous national and international conferences.