Asset and maintenance management professionals must argue the case for the importance of the discipline in Australia’s boardrooms and help educate directors in how asset management adds value to a business says John Hardwick, AMCouncil representative and current chair of World Partners in Asset Management (WPiAM) chair of . This is as much a reflection of the financial contribution that asset management can make to an organization, as it is of the way in which the practices and methodologies of the discipline have evolved in barely a decade.
Having seen many significant changes in the evolution of the Asset Management Council since 2005, Mr. Hardwick also signals the need to “re-engage with our roots and the maintenance engineers whose vision helped establish the Maintenance Engineering Society of Australia. “Maintenance and the information gathered from maintenance activities are the foundation of the effective technical and financial management of assets, “he said.
It is also time for the Asset Management Council to engage on a world stage as similar professional bodies espouse global identities. “We need a clear understanding of the skill sets that asset and maintenance engineers might have, depending on where they were trained. With similar professional bodies we need to share knowledge about our membership, our training courses and about the organizations which sponsor us. We need to speak a common language,” he said. As one of the first steps towards these objectives, he will soon oversee the launch of AMC certification of individuals in various areas of asset management.
Mr. Hardwick is executive manager, maintenance and replacement planning with Energy Australia (NSW), a state-owned corporation whose shareholder is the NSW Government. Working for one of the largest energy suppliers in Australia, Mr. Hardwick is responsible for the strategic management of all Energy Australia (EA) network system assets. His office must be able to justify the company’s network system assets, both from a financial and a technical perspective, with the Australian Energy Regulator which oversees all east coast energy companies. “We need to prove the efficiency of assets in order to obtain funding,” Mr. Hardwick says. He says working in a non-competitive environment in many ways has helped highlight the importance of asset management and encouraged him and his EA colleagues to share their knowledge with other government and commercial organizations for whom a return on the value of their assets might be seen as even more important.
John Hardwick brings a decade of membership to the national chair, having joined MESA when he was assigned to implement new maintenance standards for Energy Australia. “At that time no one in the electricity industry had the required tools, techniques and audit capabilities so I looked to a professional forum in which knowledge could be exchanged. “The benefits of membership quickly became obvious. One could embrace an industry-wide view of where other organisations were heading with asset management because MESA and the Asset Management Council are cross-industry. Membership enables one to stay at the forefront and influence the direction of asset management.” He recalls that it took some time for EA to value membership of MESA because initially he was seen as being involved purely for the acquisition of technical knowledge and skills. “In the same way that financial management is not just about accounting, asset management is not simply about technical knowledge and skills, “he said.
His first official role at MESA was to chair the Sydney chapter followed more recently by a year as vice national chair. Over the period of his membership, John has presented at numerous conferences and meetings. He was the 2002 recipient of the MESA Steve Maxwell Leadership Award and in 2005 led the team which received the Australian Maintenance Engineering Excellence Awards.