IMC-2016 Focused Forum - 40:55 
by Courtney Blalock, EDI and John Acton, Palm Beach County Water Utilities Department

We all have and use Enterprise Asset Management systems. They are an essential tool in how we maintain our Assets, schedule and plan work for those assets and track our effectiveness and efficiencies in the work place. Are we getting out of them all that we can? When we initially setup our EAM systems did we fully understand the implications of the decisions we made when we setup the Location and Asset hierarchies? Have we gone back to adjust them? Have we gone through the effort of examining ALL of our Location and System hierarchies and how they interact with each other? Many organizations find themselves performing daily maintenance and adjustments on their own EAM systems that are supposed to be helping them. This is often from choices made long ago with limited understanding of capabilities and best practices. Processes have often been put in place that require a significant amount of work to maintain and yet they still don’t provide the promises expected when the system was first implemented. We will discuss best practices around Location hierarchies; how they should be organized, how systems should be utilized and how they interact with Assets. We will further discuss how changes to Location hierarchies can affect you and how to minimize the impact to you. We will discuss the roll of Assets and their structure and how they relate to the Location hierarchy. Finally, we will discuss best practices that can be implemented by users to get them on the path to realizing the efficiencies their EAM system can bring to them.