The effective unlocking of the ‘hidden benefits’ within capital intensive investments is achieved by combining the skills necessary to: - a) deliver improved utilisation of Assets from best maintenance management practices, b) drive maintenance & materials IT Systems usage and development, c) develop professional Logistics processes and procurement strategies/contracting, d) align Management objectives and strategic planning with these issues.

As maintenance costs typically represent 35% to 45% of total costs of an operation, the economic ‘benefit’ from delivering on this improvement outcome is large, with very high returns due to the low financial investment needed.

In recent times, the focus in many industries on benchmarking has certainly highlighted these improvement opportunities to organisations management. The real challenge is how to actually deliver the improved performance and financial result.

One positive step that has been taken by many organizations is the considerable investment made in Enterprise Resource Planning systems (or Integrated Systems) such as SAP, Mincom, etc, but as organisations are finding, these alone do not produced the improvement result.

It takes considerable specialised skill, business understanding, tenacity and data exactitude to set these ERP systems up to deliver the benefits within the maintenance and materials area. To make effective use of this set up, it also takes specialized training, very much focused on the maintenance planning and materials automation areas to get at the key benefits possible.

ASL Management Services Consulting is now established to assist in this important benefits capture process.