The 17th Physical Asset Management Thought Leadership Conference entitled Sustainability through Physical Asset Management was recently held from 8 to 10 June 2011 at the Lord Charles Hotel in Somerset West. The annual conference, hosted by Pragma and co-presented by Reliabilityweb.com, Inc in the USA, sought to find practical, affordable and sustainable asset management solutions. In my capacity as editor of 'Chemical Technology', I attended this conference on the second day, managing to attend three keynote addresses and a number of talks by various speakers throughout the day.
Pragma specializes in providing physical asset management improvement services and products to their clients around the globe, while Reliabilityweb.com, Inc is a speciality publishing company focused on information delivery in a variety of formats and including the well know Uptime magazine, the Magazine for Predictive Maintenance and Condition Monitoring Professionals.
The conference began on the 8th with three workshops. Dean Griffin and Grahame Fogel from Pragma investigated PAS 55 or Public Available Specification 55, an increasingly popular asset management standard which was started in 2010 by ISO when they were approached by the British Standards Institute with their comprehensive vision for Asset Management. PAS 55 was developed in collaboration between numerous associations, the Institute for Asset Management UK being the driver, and numerous UK state and private businesses.
There are now 23 countries involved in this ISO process, whereby PAS 55 is evaluated for applicability in each country. In South Africa, as in the others, a Technical Working Committee is established. SABS represents the local ISO co-ordination with SAAMA (Southern African Asset Management Association), IMESA (Institute of Municipal Engineering of Southern Africa), Anglo, Pragma, TIDASA as members of the working group. The expected date for ISO accreditation is 2012.
Stefan Terblanche, also of Pragma, looked at the ‘Fundamentals of Asset Management', while Ramesh Gulati, Reliability Planning Manager with Aerospace Testing Alliance at Arnold Engineering Development Center, US Air Force, took a thorough look at ‘Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices'.
On Thursday morning, Terence O'Hanlyn (Reliabilityweb.com); Daniel Silke (a motivational speaker); Ramesh Gulati and John Mitchell (consultant and author) gave the keynote addresses. O'Hanlyn spoke about global views on what is working in PAM to provide sustainable benefits, explaining how to achieve mastery in maintenance and wondered why maintenance is often treated as a cost. His list of Rules for Reliability was memorable.
Other talks I attended included ‘Sustainable water management' by Richard Holden from TCTA (Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority (TCTA), a state-owned entity), who told us a lot about why we in South Africa generally pay far too little for our water; ‘Equipping future asset engineers to deliver sustainable asset management strategies and plans' by Dr P J Vlok of the University of Stellenbosch, who said, among other things: "Guarding knowledge is detrimental to the entire asset care fraternity since research is often repeated, which means the growth rate of the asset care knowledge base is severely restricted. The collective pool of asset care knowledge has matured sufficiently over the last decade that it's time to shift focus from collecting knowledge to executing and expanding the knowledge base. The asset care training environment is disorganized and inefficient at present. It's time to structure the process of sustainability."
Later in the day Brian Gleason, President of Des-Case Inc in the USA, spoke about precision lubrication and its importance in preventing and removing contamination, citing the fact that to remove contamination costs ten times as much as preventing it.
Eight companies, of which several are international, exhibited their products and services at the conference.
For more information go to www.pragmaworld.net/conference.
