There is a group of decisions that shop managers make that should be decided by the company’s board. I think top leaders are passing the buck when they leave these decisions up to the individual shop managers.
The strategic asset management plan (SAMP) is an enterprise-level policy about how fleets will treat assets such as trucks, tools, or shop buildings. It outlines what is essential to the organization and discusses safety, appearance, customer orientation, and data integrity in strategic terms.
The SAMP is not tactical. It does not prescribe how you are going to take care of the fleet. It merely lists the aspirations and priorities of the entire operation. In large organizations, the rules are the same across the enterprise.
The job of the organization’s top leaders is to set the direction of the organization. The highest expression of that activity is an active and well-known mission, vision, and values statement. The SAMP is the next level down. It sets the course for the conception, acquisition, maintenance, use, and disposal of the assets. It also defines the rules of the game and the interaction of the players. The players are the managers of all functions in all departments involved in fleet management, acquisition, and disposal. Everyone uses the same rule book.
The rule book defines the time frame, roles and responsibilities, decision-making processes, financial rules, priority rating of different possible costs, management of risk, and management systems. Extensive knowledge of the practices ensures that everyone is on the same page as far as the crucial issues of ROI, safety, code compliance, and risk.
For example, when you acquire a new asset, several groups are involved. There may be marketing personnel, accounting business analysts, engineers, purchasing professionals, lawyers, vendors, installers, operators, and maintainers. Each of these groups has different goals and different contributions to make to the success of the enterprise. The SAMP ensures that all parties are pulling in the same direction.
Developing a SAMP can be a difficult task, but top managers should not avoid it; it is their job, and everything else flows from this.
Typically, when you join an organization, you are given (or invent for yourself) tasks appropriate to your job. Everyone’s job consists of activities that they enjoy and ones they avoid. Among the activities that are most often avoided by top management are the decisions about how groups of stakeholders will interact.
My theory is that the reason top managers delegate strategic decisions to the shops, divisions, and regions is that they are avoiding making decisions that could cause conflict. They avoid these decisions because there are always conflicts between the group’s goals, KPIs, and how they deliver value to the organization. Conflict is difficult to engage with, manage, and channel. While disputes are difficult and sometimes painful to handle, it is useful to treat them before they erupt. That is where the SAMP comes in.
Joel Levitt is the president of Springfield Resources, a management consulting firm that services a variety of clients on a wide range of maintenance issues. Levitt has trained more than 17,000 maintenance leaders from more than 3,000 organizations in 38 countries. He is also the creator of Laser-Focused Training, a flexible training program that provides specific, targeted training on your schedule, online to one to 250 people in maintenance management, asset management, and reliability.
