The key to being successful is for organisations to be able to adapt as fast, or faster, than the environment and competition, which is clearly a significant challenge in the current volatile economic climate. The financial meltdown also means it’s vital to be able to determine how much cost has to be taken out, without sacrificing quality of service. Organisations also need to be able to see the impact of regulatory changes and make the right changes the first time.

Over the last three years Capgemini has been working with some of the world’s leading energy and utilities organisations to improve both their effectiveness and efficiencies across their asset base. These transformation programmes have challenged the way organisation view and manage assets to improve outage levels and ensure higher levels of performance are attained while meeting the demands and challenges driven from regulation.

This section contains:

• Benefits of Operations Asset Management
• Capgemini’s Approach
• Capgemini’s Capabilties
• Success Stories

Benefits of Operations Asset Management

Assets are critical to the success of an organisation and involve key strategic & operational decisions. These decisions cannot be made in a sub optimised disjointed fashion. Organisations need to understand the impact of the assets on their operation and define the correct strategies to optimise costs while maximising customer service levels and meeting regulatory requirements. By adopting an integrated view of assets organisations can ensure that the value is delivered across the organisation. Capgemini Consulting identifies a number of benefits buckets from adopting this “holistic approach to assets”

• Work Efficiency & Effectiveness across the Value Chain
• Asset Efficiency & Effectiveness in delivering the output
• Asset systems design and optimisation to integrate the asset base into the organisation
• Process & Procedure Compliance
• Contractor Management to optimise costs and maximise benefits
• Budget and Cost Control for Asset Capex and Opex
• Information Quality and flow to support effective asset decision making

Capgemini’s Approach

Capgemini’s approach to Operations Asset Management is focused on two key elements:

1. A proven methodology that works with you to identify opportunities in a short time frame supported by reference frameworks
2. Deployment of a team of Asset Management subject matter experts to work with your team in collaborative way and challenge the way things are done

As a result we work with you to define:

• How to deal with regulatory pressure to reduce rates and shareholder pressure to improve profitability while maintaining quality and performance levels?
• How to create a balance in the organisation between an economic assessment of what the business can afford to do and an engineering assessment of what assets need to maintain or improve their performance?
• How to create complete and defendable financial transparency across the asset base, linking proposed investments to expected risk profiles and performance?
• How to align various asset-intensive organisational entities, either within the business or stretching across components of an industry value chain to deliver a target performance to end-users?
• How to optimise the collaboration model with outside service providers to improve their efficiency and leverage their engineering, planning and work management skills?
• How to manage all business risks associated with owning and operating an asset base in an efficient, safe and affordable way?
• How to be able to outsource asset operations to third parties while keeping control over asset performance and asset returns?
• How to integrate safety, health & environment considerations in a pragmatic, yet comprehensive asset management model?
• How to ensure that asset operators and service personnel comply fully and traceable to their assigned tasks?

Capgemini’s Capabilties

Capgemini’s Asset Management capabilties focus on 5 key areas:

1. Asset Governance: Define how an organisation should be structured and governed to maximise the return on assets

2. Asset Strategy: Define the strategy to manage and operate the key assets across the organisation

3. Asset Effectiveness: Identify the processes and procedures required to operate and maintain the asset effectively across an organisation

4. Asset Efficiency: Identify improvement opportunities to increase efficiency levels

5. Asset Information & Data Management: Create the systems infrastructure required to support effective management of the asset base and to support introduction of disruptive technologies such as Smart Metering

Success Stories

Capgemini is working with the world’s leading Energy and Utilities organisations to address many of the Asset Management challenges these organisations are facing, both in terms of regulatory pressure and performance improvement. We have worked with the Utilities organisations to increase Service Levels and reduce outages while on other we have focused on restructuring the cost base and working with teams to transform the organisational culture:

Gas utilities – Conducted a detailed asset management assessment to identify opportunities for improvement across the operations and maintenance of the physical asset portfolio

Electric Utilities – Conducted a detailed assessment to review the current operational challenges and identify the opportunities to reduce the level of outages across the multiple sites.

Gas Utilities – Create the Process and systems blueprint to implement the Asset Management systems across the multiple sites in the UK.