Asset Management Practices in Norwegian Industrial Sectors

Abstract

Several industrial sectors in Norway have been subjected to challenging industrial conditions in recent years, due to factors such as declining markets and large market fluctuations. On top of these challenging industrial conditions are also the elevated demands of modern industrial society, encompassing such factors as increasing stakeholder concerns related to environmental and social effects of industrial organizations’ activities and an increasing pressure to deliver improved services and products without increasing costs or risks. A key aspect in meeting such elevated demands and challenging industrial conditions is the way in which industrial organizations manage their assets and the value they create. The discipline of asset management is interesting in this regard, as it promotes enhanced value delivery from assets, at lower risk and with improved sustainability. The principles of asset management allow industrial organizations to regularly achieve their organizational objectives and meet stakeholder expectations on a regular basis, regardless of their operating sector and organizational context. The Norwegian oil and gas industry is an industrial sector that is known to operate with asset management principles and manage assets in a way that balances costs, risks and benefits. As the discipline of asset management partially originated from the oil and gas industry in the North Sea, the Norwegian oil and gas industry has gained solid experience within the field. However, when looking at other industrial sectors in Norway, such as land-based manufacturing and land-based process, there is still limited available information regarding the current state of their asset management practices and how their individual practices actually compare to each other.

The purpose of this thesis is to perform an analysis to compare the asset management practices found in a selection of Norwegian industrial sectors, namely oil and gas, land-based manufacturing and land-based process. The included analysis incorporates an industry-leading organization within each of the industrial sectors and utilizes the common asset management practices of the ISO 55000 suite, the first ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standard for asset management, as analysis criteria. Published in January 2014, the ISO 55000 suite contains a systemized framework for practicing asset management at a prominent level in any industrial sector, for any type of asset. Its elevated level of applicability allows for a reliable cross-industrial comparison of asset management practices centered around a common set of criteria. The included analysis has resulted in an uncovering of specific performance gaps and improvement areas related to the included organizations’ asset management practices, which were found to encompass factors such as leadership differences, the lack of a formalized asset management approach and differences in the individual organizations’ perception of value. To facilitate a solid understanding of the included analysis and the uncovered results, there have also been conducted comprehensive literature studies on asset management and the ISO 55000 suite, both of which precede the included analysis of asset management practices in this thesis.

This thesis is aimed at providing interested parties with relevant insights into the current state of asset management practices in Norwegian industrial sectors. It should also function as a highly useful knowledge base for any industrial organization that contemplates an implementation of asset management practices through the framework of the ISO 55000 suite.