Maintworld 2/2020

ASSET MANAGEMENT
satisfaction. Something good can come
from something bad, just like the UN
came from World War II.
DAM AGAINST DISASTER
But we can do more than just making
things more efficient. Because crises
can, with the necessary courage and
ambition, also lead to completely new
industries and job creation. When in
World War II German U-boats destroyed
many US ships heading for the UK, the
US quickly accelerated the construction
of their Liberty ships from 6 months to
4 days for one ship, due to exponentially
increased efficiency (lean processes).
Ten years later, a storm surge in 1953
flooded entire parts of the Netherlands,
the United Kingdom, Germany and
Belgium. This disaster took the lives of
thousands of people and also meant an
unprecedented catastrophe that destroyed
large parts of the economy and
infrastructure.
But instead of giving up, the severely
affected Dutch dared to take on this
tragedy and developed the Delta plan.
With this modern wonder of the world,
our northern neighbours put themselves
on the global map as specialists in waterworks,
while at the same time creating a
new economic branch.
Every crisis changes our general spectrum
and how we look at processes. Because
in traditions and acquired knowledge
there is also a danger of rigidity and
stagnation, just think of the joke of the
sausage and the pan. Now is a time of
introspection and reflection, but also of
action and change. Or as Martin Luther
King put it: "We must build dikes of courage
against the storm surges of fear."
AI and robotics will drastically and
fundamentally change our jobs and our
sector. Our operators, maintenance
technicians and reliability engineers will
all become F1 racing drivers only concerned
with getting the maximum return
from their car and winning the race, but
during the race they also forward more
than 1,500 data points per second to the
engineers who are on the side about the
operation of their machine. The racer as
a high-tech operator with the technology
of the future.
Sounds like sheer science fiction,
right? Leonardo da Vinci drew in the 15th
century the first airplanes, Jules Verne
wrote about traveling to the moon. What
seemed like nonsense at that time is now
history. At the end of the 19th century,
people who then moved by horse and
cart and communicated mainly by letter,
might have a hard time imagining that a
few generations later their descendants
would be making video calls in self-driving
vehicles. Because neither the car nor
the phone existed back then, but a good
century later they seem indispensable.
Someone who is now 60 saw childhood
James Bond movies with futuristic gadgets
such as car radios, GPS and fingerprint
security. Someone who is 40 today
has experienced the breakthrough of the
PC, the internet, the smartphone, virtual
reality (VR), Bitcoin and AI. We now experience
the kind of accelerations which until
now would have taken us tens or hundreds
of years, in just a few years. What
will someone aged 20 or 0 experience?
One thing seems certain: the acceleration
has only just begun.
Perhaps within a few years we will
remember with nostalgia the period
when people still manually maintained
machines, electrical cabinets and installations
themselves. Question to the bravest
of asset managers: when will we make the
complete transition to AI powered and
robot performed maintenance? Now in
China, there are already advanced and implemented
applications of maintenance in
this way. Do we want to miss this boat and
drown in a Chinese flood?
ASSET MANAGEMENT IN THE
AFTER-CORONA LIFE
After the financial crisis, the banking
world changed radically and as a result
the rest of the world changed with it.
Governments demanded compensation
for provided state guarantees, imposed
BACK TO THE FUTURE (TOMORROW)
The fear of the new, like the fear of
death, is inherent in people. The great
unknown is a constant challenge for us
as humans and as humanity. But change
and "progress" are also essential elements
in our personal story and larger
historiography.
And the change is already permeating
many sectors. In the medical sector,
doctors are increasingly performing
complex operations with robots More
and more industries are proving that
human-machine integration works,
just think about Audi Brussels' stateof-the-art
production lines. What is the
difference between a human vein and a
machine cable.
AS ESSENTIAL AS THE INDUSTRY IS FOR
ALL OUR LIVES, OUR MAINTENANCE
SECTOR IS VITAL FOR THE INDUSTRY.
14 maintworld 2/2020