Centennial Associates Asset Management

February 18, 2010 Experience

Norm Mistal — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:44:02 +0000

This was an exciting week for me personally. As President of the Western NY Chapter of the International Facility Management Association I was honored to be asked to be a member of the Advisory Board for the Master of Science in Facility Management Graduate program at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY. This on-line course prepares an individual with the knowledge base to be an effective facility manager in any business or organization.
My entry into facility management was as an engineering technician in an engineering group responsible for providing test equipment and maintaining the facility for a large Division within the big yellow box company here in Rochester, NY. There wasn’t formal training for facility managers in 1979 so you grew in the position through day-to-day experience, you learned by doing. In fact there was not any discipline called Facilities Management. Probably the closest I got to that was through working with the IE’s assigned to work with our group. Over time I gained the skills and developed resources needed to manage facilities projects daily and to develop timely solutions outcomes that satisfied our internal customers. It wasn’t until the mid-1980’s facility management became a career path. With the RIT MS graduate program a full-time student can learn in 20 months or 2 years part-time what I learned over nearly 15 years as a full-time facility manager. True, you never stop learning and after leaving the big box in 1991, those skills learned never go away. Today, I’m still involved with many of the facets of facility management particularly the unique service of building asset databases for facility managers and maintenance mangers who are truly interested in reducing costs using the technologies available to track equipment and costs.
Take a moment and review the program content available in the on-line program. See if it’s for you. Do in 20-24 months what took me the nearly 15 years to learn and many learn better.

http://www.rit.edu/programs/program_detail.php?id=410

February 2010 – Improve use of your CMMS program

Norm Mistal — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:19:13 +0000

New information is always coming across my desk. I found two interesting articles in the on-line FacilitiesNet magazine.

CMMS programs, once implemented, sometimes become over time underutilized whereby the actual return on investment, ROI, isn’t achieved as quickly as was the intention. The following links below discuss ways to maximize, improve overall use of a CMMS program that will increase productivity and reduce costs.

Centennial Associates, Inc., over the last three years, has specialized in unique facilities services providing customers a data collection process that builds baseline inventories of maintainable assets to populate a company’s Computer Maintenance Management System quickly and cost effectively.

If you would like more information on our services, contact us at 585-671-0544.

Getting the most from CMMS – http://www.facilitiesnet.com/software/tip/Getting-the-Most-from-a-CMMS–18327

CMMS: 5 commonly under used functions – http://www.facilitiesnet.com/software/tip/CMMS-Five-Commonly-Underused-Functions–20585

Have a great day.

January 2010 Asset Management Trends

Norm Mistal — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:56:23 +0000

Asset Management Trends

January, 2010

Organizations need automated asset recording, tracking and management in this uncertain environment.

For the past several years of economic uncertainty, organizations have especially tried to account for and exploit their investment in physical assets. Consequently, they have turned to automated asset recording and tracking (among other business intelligence tools) to diminish the cost associated with asset management, to lower risk, while minimizing time needed to properly report information.

With diminishing workforce numbers, in physically dispersed locations and other active organizational changes plus stricter control requirements, manual processes to track physical assets may be unacceptably prolonged, protracted and even inaccurate.

Manual processes are time-consuming — In a dynamically changing environment, it is challenging and time-consuming to manually update the asset database every time a new piece of hardware is purchased, installed or removed or a hardware item changes. Without recurrent updates, the utility of the information about those assets declines in significance and simply put…becomes less useful.

Management reports and decisions—Asset managers can typically avail themselves of a fair amount of asset records – but conscientious analysis of that data is key for taking important actions. Up-to-date counts of physical assets, age, condition, cost and value analysis, are essential.

Manual processes are costly — Ensuring that asset data is correct and consistent can entail a lot of procedure and effort, both to initialize the process and more importantly to update it periodically. This effort can involve significant time and could be rather costly.

Need for a single, accurate asset database — It’s important that organizations maintain some central asset management database to store information of various kinds – even if departments or divisions also maintain their own data This information is critical to make strategic decisions for the entire organization including efficient asset management, accurate planning for upcoming projects, and for identifying and extracting potential asset savings.

As a result of external uncertainties and desire for greater understanding of and control over physical assets, organizations should move to automated asset tracking to optimize asset levels, reduce risk and manage or reduce asset management costs.

If you would like Asset Management Trends to cover a particular issue you’re wrestling with, please let us know.