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For more information on the Managing Ageing Assets and to book your place, visit the event website.
Please provide us with a brief overview of your current role and how it exposes you to ageing assets?
Tim Ingram (TI): I support a wide variety of sectors to build Asset Management frameworks to develop consistent risk based decision making across domains such as Nuclear, Transportation, Defence, and Oil and Gas. Due to the types of equipment involved this inevitably this leads to conversation of either how to manage existing assets or plan long term in the investment of new assets.
What do you see as the key priorities for engineers faced with this challenge?
TI: The ability to balance the whole life engineering with the investment priorities of organisations, and indoing so foster longtermism. Quite often the lowest capital cost strategy is to delay investment in ageing assets, or “do the minimum”. However this quickly causes increased costs in the medium term often coupled with lost availability & capability. Whilst this is well known logic, often the people making the decisions will not see the medium term impacts of the decisions they make.
What new strategies or projects in asset management do you think have the potential to change things for the better?
TI: Whilst information has been becoming more readily available the ability to tie this to future performance, and organisational investment hasn’t been common place. Establishing common data frameworks, and open source approaches to aggregating information has the potential to fundamentally change the way decisions are made in a timely manner.
What are the risks for organisations who don’t take a proactive approach?
TI: Increased cost, reduced availability & capability and a potential that they become uncompetitive in their given market place.
What motivates you to organise this event?
TI: The only way we can evolve the way we think is to come together as a community, and I would rather be an advocate for change within this domain as I have experienced first hand the impact of poorly planned aging assets.
Which topics or speakers are you most looking forward to?
TI: Peer to peer discussions to understand first hand the challenges and opportunities that the domain faces.