Insights

Moving from reactivity to a proactive and preventative strategy is critical to creating an asset portfolio that’s fit for the future: robust, resilient, sustainable and customer-focused. This guide discusses why asset management apps – the right kind of asset management apps – are critical to optimizing and reoptimizing your portfolio for scenario planning in a constantly shifting landscape.

Top five takeaways:

• Remind yourself that for asset-intensive organizations, asset management is business intelligence.
• Manage multiple variables through evidence-based decision making.
• Optimize continually and remember that planning isn’t set-it-and-forget-it. Ideally, optimization should happen monthly, weekly or even daily.
• Aim for a virtuous circle of information management, where operational reactions feed into strategy and vice versa.
• Empower yourself with tools that are built for purpose, and that will provide the frameworks and insights your business requires. In such a dynamic landscape, not everything can be managed through human interaction and spreadsheets alone.

Asset management determinations should drive decision-making at every level of the asset-intensive organization. It’s fundamental to future-proofing, but the way these decisions are made is fundamentally complex.

Various stakeholders, varying objectives. Multiple assets, different constraints. Never-ending spreadsheets, ever-changing parameters. Your organization’s long-term asset management objectives depend on managing these myriad projects and variables — and those objectives can only be achieved when strategy and operations are aligned.

How can you bring these constantly shifting asset management priorities together?

Make data your day-to-day

Absorbing information from the frontline is essential: taking operational data and feeding it into strategy is key to building resilience. You can’t prioritize the right projects on ‘gut feel’. Those decisions need to be informed by a comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date dataset from which you can draw focused insights. Mitigate the risks of downtime in an objective, data-driven way and you’ll recover more quickly. Data management needs to be a continuous process, unifying your organization’s decision making with a common language and clear, visual outputs you can trust.

Indeed, a resilient organization can only be built on resilient processes. You need to be able to re-optimize, react and replan — month-by-month, week-by-week, day-by-day — ensuring you’re always making the most of your assets and investments. Being regularly informed by the latest data on asset performance and integrity enables you to confidently plan strategies and investments - targeting and prioritizing weak points in your portfolio. Maintaining this level of oversight means there’s less disruption or late pivoting in your strategy. But how can you be confident your decisions will pay off?

A proactive strategy needs predictive analysis

Organizations manage hundreds of projects. And project variables, including changes in priority, investment and risk factors, vary by their very nature. To continually assess, monitor and understand short- and long-term impact, asset managers need to constantly evaluate outcomes to understand exactly where to direct resources, and exactly when to do so.

To streamline this process and validate your decision making, you need predictive analysis tools that can project a clear view of the impact of individual actions on your specific project and wider portfolio. A purpose-built solution that is specifically engineered for asset management gives you the most flexibility to model scenarios against your particular constraints, explore outcomes, and then communicate an evidence-backed, optimized operational plan throughout your organization.

Digital solutions for future-proof processes

If an asset intensive organization is to be agile, flexible, and responsive enough to manage constantly shifting priorities, its data collection and analysis processes need to be the same. Manual processes typically silo the useful data you need to analyze, but digital solutions, such as Arcadis Gen’s Universal Visual Optimizer (UVO), are built to address the specific challenges asset managers face, offering robust insight for both day-to-day decisions and crisis response. As a result, you can communicate portfolio management updates from changing priorities effectively, having made transparent, dynamic decisions about your capital program. UVO isn’t intended to overhaul your existing processes, but enhance and streamline them through digitalization for greater efficiency, accuracy and reliability.

UVO works with your existing data to build a baseline plan from which you can overlay specific constraints, including budget, resource and service performance frameworks. You can visualize and compare scenarios pre- and post-investment, then export optimized plans for ongoing tactical delivery. Advanced optimization analytics rapidly search for the most valuable investment outcome, enabling you to clearly see opportunities across your portfolio as they evolve.

Organizations are increasingly realizing the benefit of digitalized asset management. But the capability of these tools will only become more important as manual approaches continue to fall behind the sector’s ever-shifting, complex demands — not only to your asset integrity, but to that of your organization.