The concept of asset management is not a new but an evolving idea that has been attracting attention

of many organisations operating and/or owning some kind of infrastructure assets. The term asset
management have been used widely with fundamental differences in interpretation and usage.
Woodhouse [5] suggested that there is at least 6 distinct current uses of the term as follows:

The financial services sector has long used the phrase to describe the management of a stock or
investment portfolio – trying to find the best mix of capital security/growth and interest rates/yield.

Main board (usually financial) directors and some city analysts use the term in relation to mergers and
acquisitions– buying and selling companies, re-organising them, divesting low value elements and trying
to raise capital value and/or yields.

Equipment maintainers have also adopted the name in an attempt to gain greater credibility and
respect for their activities. As „maintenance‟ has for so long been treated as a necessary evil and low on
the budgeting priority list, perhaps calling it „Asset Management‟ instead will raise awareness on the
corporate agenda. „Asset Management‟ becomes, therefore, a more sellable way of saying „better and
more business-focussed maintenance‟.

In line with the maintainers seeking greater corporate clout, the large number of software vendors
selling „computerised maintenance management systems‟ (i.e. asset registers, work management,
history gathering, materials & cost databases) have relabelled their products as “Enterprise Asset
Management Systems”.

In the information systems world, “Asset Management” is interpreted as just the bar-code labelling of
computers and peripherals, and the tracking of their location/status.

An increasing number of critical infrastructure or plant owners and operators have adopted „Asset
Management‟ to describe their core business – the combination of investing in, exploiting and caring for
appropriate physical plant and infrastructure over its entire life.

In the current usage, infrastructure asset management has been adopted as the label for the integrated,
whole life, risk based management of industrial infrastructure, as evolved principally in the North Sea oil
and gas industry during the late 1980‟s and early 1990‟s [6]. Deregulation and privatisation of
infrastructure such as utilities, transport and public services in the late 1980‟s and early 1990‟s have
resulted in many organisations need to transform their infrastructure assets from cost centres charged
with carrying out budget projects into profit centres charged with contributing to earnings growth. This
has indirectly encouraged organisations to adopt a more holistic approach to manage their
infrastructure assets and hence the adoption of asset management.

In comparison to other disciplines such as construction, facilities, maintenance, project management,

economics, finance, to name a few, infrastructure asset management is a relatively new discipline and is
clearly a contemporary topic. The primary contributors to the literature in asset management are largely
government organisations and industry practitioners. These contributions take the form of guidelines
and reports on the best practice of asset management. More recently, some of these best practices have
been made to become a standard such as PAS 55 [7] in UK. Hence, the literature tends to lack
wellgrounded theories.

What Are Marketing Assets?

Marketing assets include anything used by an organization to promote its products, services, or brand.
Emails, brochures, datasheets, presentations, sales letters, blog articles, website content, videos, and
images are some of the most popular assets available to external customers.

What are Strategic Linkages:

over the past decade has been the proliferation. of strategic linkages among firms competing in the.
same industry. These linkages include mergers, acquisitions, equity partnerships, consortia, joint.

Benchmarking is the process of measuring key business metrics and practices and comparing them—
within business areas or against a competitor, industry peers, or other companies around the world—to
understand how and where the organization needs to change in order to improve performance.

What is by-product? (side effects)

an incidental or secondary product made in the manufacture or synthesis of something else.

A lean organizational structure is a structure that is designed to create more customer value using
fewer resources than a traditional organizational structure. Members of an organization that utilizes a
lean structure focus on the value stream the organization uses to deliver goods and services to their
customers.

A flat organization refers to an organization structure with few or no levels of management between
management and staff level employees. The flat organization supervises employees less while
promoting their increased involvement in the decision-making process .

Organizational culture is the collection of values, expectations, and practices that guide and inform the
actions of all team members. Think of it as the collection of traits that make your company what it is. ...
Culture is created through consistent and authentic behaviors, not press releases or policy documents.

What is Streamlining?

Streamlining refers to the improvement of the efficiency of a certain process within an organization. It
can be done by automation, simplification of tasks, or elimination of unnecessary steps using modern
techniques and technology.

Streamlining is the optimization of business processes within an organization. Fully optimized and
automated operations help businesses achieve their highest potential, saving time, and minimizing risks.
Companies should think of working capital processes to be automated and streamlined.

Implementing an information system to help employees easily access needed databases from other
departments can significantly improve inter-departmental efficiency.

Streamlining Financial Processes for Growth

Finance departments are responsible for an organization’s entire cash flow. They monitor all cash
inflows and outflows, making sure that money is paid and received properly.

When a company grows at a very fast rate, the quantity of documentation and invoices increases as
well. Suppose project managers regularly request the finance team to provide reports about their
budgets. This puts pressure on the finance team to keep up with the rapid growth,
increasing operational risk. To address the issue, the company can opt to hire more employees;
however, that does not address the root of the problem.

If hiring is not the solution, how will the company streamline financial processes so that risks are
minimized?

The company can transfer more responsibility and accountability to budget managers outside of the
finance department. One solution is to automate the budgeting process. The company can provide an
online dashboard of budget allocations for each project manager.

By doing so, project managers will gain instant, automated access to their budget reports. They will also
be able to see the impact of their project decisions on cash inflows and outflows. This helps solve the
scalability problem of the finance team.

Streamlining Efficiency with Working Capital

Streamlining efficiency with working capital is very important for a business. Let us look at some
strategies that organizations utilize to streamline efficiency.

A company can eliminate errors by automating the processes of collecting account receivables and
paying account payables. The manual work of preparing invoices and settling payables can lead to
mistakes that will slow things down in the long term. It is worth it to invest in technical systems to
automate the accounts receivable and accounts payable processes.

Another strategy can be using non-cash options. Vendors and customers can receive and send payments
online through a payment platform, bank (wire) transfers, or credit cards so that everything is
streamlined in one place.

One other strategy is to centralize supplier and customer information, so everyone in the company who
needs access to the database is aware of where to go and how to find it. For example, information
systems are extensively used by business entities and are becoming more and more popular. They speed
up the communication process between the departments. This is especially critical in relation to
requesting information from other departments.

Finally, one can standardize the terms for collections and payments, which means saving time for team
members. They will not need to spend significant amounts of time managing complicated systems with
various terms relevant to customers and suppliers.

The main point is that all the options above aim to significantly improve efficiency for the company.

Infrastructure asset management is the integrated, multidisciplinary set of strategies in

sustaining public infrastructure assets such as water treatment facilities, sewer lines, roads, utility
grids, bridges, and railways. Generally, the process focuses on the later stages of a facility's life cycle,
specifically maintenance, rehabilitation, and replacement. Asset management specifically uses
software tools to organize and implement these strategies with the fundamental goal to preserve and
extend the  service life  of long-term infrastructure assets which are vital underlying components in
maintaining the  quality of life  in society and efficiency in the economy.[1] In the 21st century, climate
change adaptation has become an important part of infrastructure asset management competence