asset management

Determining and Proving Which Projects or Maintenance or Asset Replacement Tasks Are Really Worthwhile and When

by Bill Reekie, Karen Whitehall and Andy Hunt

Management periodicals are unanimous in advocating the integration of services into core product offerings. Servitization is the term for these integrated packages of client-focused combinations of products, services, support, self-service and knowledge. ¹ Historically, most of a product's value was added during the production process, which transformed raw material to a useful product. Today, value comes from technological improvement, styling, branding and other attributes that only services can create. ^{2, 3, 4}

by Thomas Van Hardeveld

Reliability has become such an integral expectation in our society that it is difficult to imagine a world where things do not work as expected. The first use of the word reliability was by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who bestowed the word on his friend, the poet Robert Southey, to praise his steadfastness. From this seemingly insignificant usage of the term, reliability has grown enormously to a broadly accepted, if not entirely understood, property that everyone expects for a wide range of situations. Online searches for reliability and related terms result in thousands of references in papers and manuscripts and literally millions of hits on the Internet.

Crossrail is a high frequency, rail link being built to serve London and South East England. Twin 21km tunnels (42km combined) are being bored across London to link the surface sections of Crossrail and the 10 new stations being constructed along the route, 35km of which have already been excavated by eight tunnel boring machines.