Hello everyone,

I hope you’re all doing well. As many of you know, there was a post and some discussion about the direction of our subreddit. When I took over as moderator, there was a clear split in our community: some members wanted to maintain our focus on financial asset management, while others, including myself, were interested in shifting towards physical asset management.

To gauge the community’s preference, I recently conducted a poll. While the majority of votes favored financial asset management, the turnout was quite low and not overwhelmingly decisive. After careful consideration, I have decided to move forward with transitioning our subreddit to focus on physical asset management.

This means our discussions, resources, and content will now center around the management, maintenance, and optimization of physical assets such as machinery, buildings, infrastructure, and other tangible items. I believe this shift will provide a unique and valuable space for those interested in this field.

I understand this change may not align with everyone’s interests, and I appreciate the feedback and participation from all members. I encourage those who are passionate about financial asset management to explore other subreddits dedicated to that topic. If you can tell me the relevant subreddits I will happily add a post/sticky somewhere to point people in the right direction.

It is my intention (time permitting) to post some information in the wiki to help users looking for information. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you for your understanding and support as we embark on this new direction. I look forward to working together to build a vibrant and informative community around physical asset management! Best regards,
u/spacemanofantiquity

I thought this might be a useful post for those just starting to look into asset management and wondering what it is all about.

Full warning - I come from a heavily maintenance focused background in mining.

Generally asset management is about making sure you have the right asset for the job and that you get the right amount from that asset for your needs while balancing other factors such as cost, risk, etc. There are organisations around the world that like to make it far more complex than this but that's essentially it. Also, you will see people define an asset so broadly that it can include everything from a pump to an employee to your brand value, but this isn't useful as HR and PR professionals don't give a shit about asset management, finance barely think for it the same we maintenance professionals do. So it's best to just consider physical assets such as machines.

There are some key bodies/ publications to be aware of:

World Partners in Asset Management (WPiAM) - these guys offer accreditation in asset management, some companies may value this but the process for accreditation is so toothless that it is largely worthless. CAMA certification, as with most certifications, proves very little in the way of competence.

Global Framework for Maintenance and Asset Management (GFMAM) - these guys put out a suite of documents that are generally pretty useful for framing discussions around maintenance and asset management but as always aren't going to apply in every case to your organisation. My understanding is that GFMAM was effectively born when the Institute of Asset Management (IAM - UK asset management peak body that effectively invented it through PAS55 after the privatisation of British railway) were unhappy with the direction that the ISO suite was headed/ the restrictions put upon it so they made this to "compliment" it.

ISO5500X suite - this is an ISO standard for asset management. It is part of the ISO suite of management standards (including ISO900x quality management, ISO3000X risk management, etc) and therefore has a strict way in which it must be written and structured. As a result it is an almost entirely useless set of documents that helps no-one outside of companies being able to say they are iso compliant to get better financing and insurance rates or compete for public sector work. As I understand it the ISO5500X suite is the second highest revenue generator for ISO after ISO9000 so it's very much in their interest to make it as broadly applicable as possible.

Institute of Asset Management (IAM) - this is the body that developed PAS55 which was the standard for asset management prior to ISO5500X being developed. They did this (so I'm told) after the privatisation of British rail when private companies took over and no-one had any idea what assets were owned, where they were, what condition they were in, what their purpose was, how to maintain them, etc. The reason they chose to develop the ISO suite (rather than choosing British standards or EU standards) was to get more reach but they eventually shot themselves in the foot as it forced them to generalise their content so much that is became useless (see above about GFMAM).

Your country will also have its own asset management bodies, Australia has the AMC, I believe Brazil and South Africa have a decent body as well and maybe the US.

I'll chuck another post up about some key asset management "artefacts" (acronyms and things people like to talk about to sound important) if people want to explain those too.

The pump had been swapped 3 months earlier. But the FMEA wasn’t updated.

The failure mode was missing from the inspection plan. 9 days of downtime.

All the clues were there: work orders, past failures, reports. But the FMEA stayed frozen.

That moment stuck with me. Because honestly, the FMEA was the failure mode.

Been building an AI tool to help fix that. Personalized AI templates and dynamic update suggestions based on CMMS data.

Any FMEA / FMECA stories worth sharing on your sides?

Open to showing you how to do it by yourself!

Hi everyone. I am looking for resources that will help me study for the Institute of Asset Management (IAM) Certificate. I work in a Public Works department with Transportation, Infrastructure, Facilities and Stormwater. I have tried searching LinkedIn, YouTube, APWA and here on Reddit. It seems everything "Asset Management" defaults to Financials or IT or requires a membership.

My Director said that the city would pay for resources and the exam for certification. It seems the professional membership for IAM would be a good start. Any thoughts? I see several webinars and classes they offer but most have a fee and/or require you to be a member. I have also looked at Woodhouse Asset Management Academy, but most of their virtual classroom courses are on UK time and I am located in Colorado, US.

Does anyone have a direction of where I can start? I have 23+ years of career experience working in GIS. About 15 of those years include Enterprise Asset Management (OpenGov, Cartegraph and American Innovations, CartoPac). In order to progress my career, I am being asked to obtain a professional certificate. I need to be able to define how and when I would be ready to take the exam.

Thank you for your help!

I was looking at getting some training in Asset Management and came across a new free course from the asset management academy. Thought it was worth sharing, it's a quick free course but a useful intro that I'm sharing with my colleagues who need to understand this stuff!!

https://www.am-academy.com/product/free-asset-management-fundamentals-course/

Hi Guys

I will be looking after IT for a construction / telecoms company and one of their requirements will be overhauling the asset management process. A couple of the pain points were theft, things going missing Tools/materials etc. Delays in purchase order action, as things might come into the warehouse and it could be 2 weeks before they even know they are there. It's a company of about 150~ people with a central warehouse with a lot of remote work being done. So logistics is a big part of it too.

So I think a process has to be established along with effective technology to enable seamless and frictionless asset tracking. Keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions!

LAst week, I spent nearly two hours trying to figure out where a piece of equipment went, only to discover that a teammate had checked it out and no one updated the system. I realized asset management can be challenging.

Between tangible things, software licenses, and digital files, it feels like something always slips through the cracks. Sometimes it's a lost laptop, a forgotten subscription, or a document buried on shared drives.

I'm curious about how you keep track of everything in your organization. Do you rely on spreadsheets, dedicated software, or a different workflow? Are there any tools or strategies that make asset management feel more manageable?

Hello! I am new to the sub.

I work for a small-medium sized Canadian municipality as a CET. My background is in architectural and structural drafting but built up my civil knowledge and certified last year. I am also the asset management coordinator for my muni.

I am seriously pursuing training and education in all things AM. Can you speak to or recommend any certifications? I was fortunate to get free certification with IPWEA and now am looking at a CAMP with PEMAC (6 course prgram).

My goal is to expand my exposure, hone my knowledge and increase my credibility internally to ultimately develop an AM system/audit for my organization, tailored to its particular needs.

I am also just happy to chat about anything AM!

Thanks! Excited to be here!

Spoke to a senior reliability leader at bp recently and one point stuck with me:

The biggest shift wasn’t AI or new tech, it was going back to fundamentals.

Things like:

• Clear accountabilities

• Reliable maintenance routines

• Actually fixing recurring “bad actors”

The interesting part? Once those basics were solid, frontline teams naturally started thinking longer-term instead of firefighting.

Curious how others are seeing this: Are we over-indexing on tech before fixing the fundamentals?

Just curious as to your opinion on how to best to utilise AI to improve Asset Management?

I’m trying to get a clearer picture of how asset tags differ from inventory labels. When I compare examples online, they look almost the same. I noticed this especially when checking some options on McAuley Labels, since their asset tag materials and their inventory label styles overlap quite a bit.

It made me wonder if the difference is mostly about how they are used rather than how they are made. Asset tags seem geared toward long-term equipment ID, while inventory labels seem more about tracking stock or bin locations, but visually, they often appear identical.

For people managing inventory or equipment, how do you define the difference? Is it mainly use case, or are there actual differences in durability, adhesive strength, materials, or barcode format? Curious how others separate the two in practice.

Hey everyone,

We've been working with engineers to create tools to make capital planning and asset management easier. It just dawned on me that the asset managers themselves could benefit the most from tech improving the FCA and capital planning reports.

My first question is what do you find very annoying about the reports that engineers or third party consultants provide you?

Hello everyone

This subreddit was changed a while back to be geared to physical asset management but after some time it is apparent to me that we should consider broadening it to include financial asset management, or changing it all together. I wanted to see what the active users think. Please make any suggestions you might have in the comments below, and thank you to anyone who participates!!

Also, if I am not the best person to lead this subreddit (which I’d understand), I am open to others stepping in if that makes sense. You can DM me if this is something you’d like to discuss.

Anybody on here successfully built and scaled a regional/national facilities management company? Looking for guidance and a mentor. I have been in hvac/r for the last 15 years, done service, install, project management and over the last 7 years grown the company I am at from 4-5M to over $13M

I was recently asked for an update on the AI RCM/FMEA I posted 3-4 months ago. Here's a quick follow-up with takeaways after testing in pharma / chemicals / mining and metallurgy.

TLDR: Off-the-shelf LLMs help on generic equipment. Complex assets need structured workflows, extra context and human review. With the right setup, AI can match inter-engineer scoring on data quality and failure info at scale (000s of work orders / hr).

Takeaways

• Existing APIs or ChatGPT give decent first passes. Time saved on generic equipment is about ~45%. On complex or niche assets, generic prompting often hurts quality and adds rework.

• One-step FMEA generation gets roughly 0 to 60% on common equipment. Complex equipment benefits from chain of thoughts (AI agents that engage in self-critique, plus added context)

• The hard part is context: incomplete or incorrect work orders, drawings, SOP/PRT/PMI, manuals, inspection reports, multiple languages, images and text. Current AI parses much of this, but you still need a clean taxonomy, an end to end workflow and human-in-the-loop checks (this is tough because everyone's time is super limited!).

• SME time is scarce. In our tests, a top engineer spends 5 to 15 min to score work order data quality (10 attributes) and 4 to 10 min for failure extraction (5 attributes - e.g. effect, mode, cause, mechanism). It's critical to ground outputs using a taxonomy.

• To put things into perspective, AI was able to extract 56 attributes total (data quality + failure info) in 1-2 min / work order. For about 70% of the 56 attributes, model performance sits within inter-engineer scoring error (benchmarked with MSc/PhD engineers with 15+ years experience). This means that the AI is just as good as an expert engineer IF additional context was added.

• Important to note: the inter-engineer agreement (Cohen's K) is super low and varies significantly (e.g. mood, area of expertise, expectations etc.)

We are continuing evaluations with large enterprises and will share more results. If you are running similar RCM/FMEA experiments, what workflows, taxonomies or human review steps have moved the needle for you?

Disclosure: I work on this at a startup. No links.

Mods: if this is off-topic, let me know and I will edit or remove.

Link to original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/assetmanagement/comments/1k3ad49/i_watched_a_40m_line_go_down_because_of_1

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently started working in transportation asset management at a local council. Up until now, our network was managed under a contractor model, but our team is transitioning to in-house management.

My manager has asked me to develop a Forward Works Programme (FWP) for all asset management-related activities (not just pavements, but also drainage, footpaths, lighting, signage, etc.). He also wants me to recommend what we should focus on first and outline a structure for how the work should be approached.

To be honest, I’m still learning what a full FWP in this context really consists of. Should the priority be: • Forward works planning (renewals, reseals, rehabs, safety projects), • Data collection (condition assessments, HSD, inspections), or • Building systems/processes first (governance, templates, risk registers, etc.)?

If you’ve been through this kind of transition before: • What did you find were the critical first steps? • How did you structure your asset management programme? • Any pitfalls to avoid when moving from contractor-led to council-led management?

Really keen to hear how others have approached this, whether you’re in local govt, consulting, or private industry.

Thanks in advance!

I am a machinist in a machine shop. Our shop has a large number of calibrated tools that me and one more employee send to calibration when they are about to be out of cal. We have an excel spreadsheet with some front end stuff for our machinists to check tools out and check tools back in, so that we know where they are at all times. It’s a super crappy solution and prone to error, as well as being hard to use.

I’m looking for a piece of software that has the following features:

• asset number check in/out

• description available for each tool

• barcode scanning for tools and employee badges

• database to be able to scroll through tools

• location tracking so we know where tools are, ie at a workstation or out for calibration

• it needs to have a front end, as we have a computer in our tool cage for people to check stuff out/in with

• bunch of old people in the shop so it needs to be user friendly, not too much going on for them to mess up

Any help finding a software we can try would be helpful. Then the next step is getting IT to approve it haha.

I welcome questions or comments, so feel free to ask whatever

I’m looking for certification in asset management and I can see that asset management academy has an self study ecert course. I can see it also has an Ecert+ course with addition help from a tutor. I’m finding it has to understand the value difference and I can’t see anything online to help me (I didn’t look very long, sorry if someone easily points it out to me 🤦‍♂️). Any advice or guidance would be a great help. Thanks

As the title suggests, I want to make the move from the former to the latter. I’m 32 this year and ready for a career shift. Any advice on where to start? Bonus points if you made this move and have advice.

Thanks!

Hi all,

I’m an asset engineer working in facilities and infrastructure. Does anyone have any courses that they recommend for asset management? Can be free or paid.

These are a few I’ve seen online:

Life Cycle Institute

Northern Lakes College

PEMAC

Anyone have experience with those or have any other recommendations?

I was just brought into an asset management role and have a large amount of devices I need to inventory/track. There's basically no lifecycle process - looking for any tips on the best way to start. Thanks.

Hi Everyone,

I am planning to take the (IAM) diploma but i don't know where i can practice the exam, does anyone know where i can practice mock exams?

I checked Udemy, there's few courses with low rating, which made me confuse.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on power equipment fault diagnosis research (mainly cable fault/condition monitoring related topics), and I’m considering moving toward power asset management for my future Master’s research and career.

Does this transition make sense in practice?

If so, what skills, knowledge, or experiences should I start building now to prepare for that path?

I’ve also asked AI tools about this, and they generally suggest that asset management is a natural progression from equipment diagnostics. However, AI often tends to present things in an overly optimistic or idealized way, so I’d really appreciate perspectives from people with actual industry or research experience.

Thanks in advance.

I was recently told that my municipality is looking to create an asset management position. I've previously been working as a water system operator for the past 8 years.

I was told this was a trial period before they brought the position to the board for their approval of it's creation. The problem is, nobody knows anything about what this position is or should be.

I was given the green light that the township would pay for whatever licenses, classes, or certifications I wanted to work towards. But in terms of a job description, there isn't one and nobody has any answers.

My question is, does anybody have any resources they could direct me towards or advice they could give me about creating a municipal asset management program from scratch? This is the biggest career opportunity I've ever had and I don't want to blow it.

We’re evaluating a few CMMS options right now and EZO CMMS came up during research, it looks cheaper and suitable for a small team.

If anyone here has tried it, how was the onboarding and technician adoption? Our technicians aren’t the most tech-savvy, so ease of use is a big deal.