Name It to Tame It

Hello and welcome to Transforming Asset Management, our regular video series where we discuss key asset management topics and share tips drawn from our collective experience in industry. Dave Horstman's with me again today, and we're talking name it to tame it, an issue that's affected pretty much all of us who have worked in asset management. We've seen inconsistencies or errors in asset naming and identification conventions, and also in the way assets are categorized and the different assignments of attributes to those assets. And although in the grand context of infrastructure management, some data inconsistencies might seem like a small issue. They actually have significant knock on effects for our business, efficiency and also our decision making ability when we really want to utilize that information. So Dave, why do these areas keep happening across organizations and how can they be avoided? Yeah. Yeah. And look, I have to say upfront, mate. I love the name of this episode. Yeah. That's an awesome name. Look, to to your point, I don't think we can overstate just how important it is to manage your data as an asset in and of itself. Right? There's a lot of cost savings to be had. And to your point, there's a lot of better decision making and better analysis to be undertaken once we've got our data tamed. So look, again, three key takeaways when it comes to doing that. Firstly, governance. It's all about governance. So in terms of your asset register, and your system, really important that you establish the right user roles and you control those permissions. Who has access to edit what? Yeah. What you don't want to do is leave it as open slather and people just entering whatever they like. The second key thing is actually have a data standard. So again, in keeping with the governance theme, actually make sure you develop the supporting underlying data standard that provides details around what your minimum viable attributes are, what are the key things that you need to be recording, and then to the extent that you can standardize those fields. So when it particularly when it comes to classification elements like type, subtype class, subclass, hierarchy, criticality, all of those things, again, they shouldn't be open slather in terms of what's recorded in there. You really should have a data standard that drives what values can and should be selected in there. And then ultimately as the third point, it's you have the ability with the right system to be able to set up somewhat automated auditing of those data as well, right? Being able to set up reports, basically exception reports is how I refer to them. So you can run those on a periodic basis to ensure that your governance processes are working. And it also means that you have issues. You can track them early and correct them. Doing those three things is going to put you in a really powerful position with your data. Oh, yeah. Thanks for that. Super usable points. And for organizations that have separate but linked asset and financial registers, should the processes be the same for the financial registers as for the asset register? Well, the beauty is with a good system and a solid accounting evaluations module, you've actually got all of the detail that you need in terms of generating your detailed movements in that physical asset register. So you've got that underlying detail that then just rolls up at the higher level to your finance reporting. Yeah. So again, that's really the critical thing. If you've done it right in the first instance, all of that financial reporting becomes a lot cleaner and a lot more effective as well. So putting you in a really strong position with audit. Alright. Thanks for joining me again, David, and sharing your thoughts. And thanks everyone joining the video. Please feel free to engage with the the reactions or the comments. We've seen some great comments coming through sharing your experience from industry as well. So, yeah, we'd love to hear from you as well. So look out for our next video of transforming asset management coming soon. See you.