Physical asset management in maintenance

In many companies, people still talk about competitiveness by looking at production, sales, or finances. But in practice, the battle is won or lost in how physical assets are managed: plants, equipment, support systems, and infrastructure that sustain the business every day.

The ISO 55000:2024 standard (second edition) is now the global reference. It defines asset management, its principles and terminology, and establishes a framework for organizations to manage their assets throughout their life cycle and obtain more value from them. The Spanish version UNE-ISO 55000:2025 is the equivalent of this 2024 edition.

Based on this framework, this article clearly answers three questions: what physical asset management is, how it is applied (phases), and when it makes sense to implement it—connecting it with the reality of industrial maintenance and reliability.

What is physical asset management?

Asset management and maintenance

ISO 55000 defines an asset as something that has value or potential value for the organization, and asset management as the set of coordinated activities to obtain that value throughout the life cycle.

This standard also specifies that “realizing value will typically involve balancing costs, risks, opportunities, and performance benefits.” (Institute of Asset Management, 2015)

The consulted literature differentiates in simple terms: Maintenance management focuses on planning and executing tasks (corrective, preventive, predictive) to preserve equipment function. Meanwhile, physical asset management governs the entire asset life cycle (planning, designing, acquiring, operating, maintaining, renewing, retiring), aligning decisions with business strategy, risks, and costs.

Asset management in maintenance is the process of managing physical assets throughout their life cycle to ensure their reliability, availability, and profitability.
In this management process, it is important to define what you have, where it is, how it is performing, and what work and economic data are associated with it.

Benefits of physical asset management

Among the benefits highlighted by standards and specialized guides are:

• Better financial performance and more well-founded investment decisions.
• Increased availability and reliability of critical assets.
• Reduction of operational, safety, and environmental risks.
• More consistent compliance with regulations and standards.
• More sustainable operations, with better use of resources and energy.

Additionally, it follows that good asset management means centralizing data in a platform, planning maintenance intelligently, and making decisions based on real-time information.

Asset management anatomy

In Asset Management – an Anatomy (IAM, 2015), a powerful idea is presented: managing assets is not just knowing equipment, but understanding the complete system they form and how that system creates value at three levels:

• Strategic: what assets the organization needs and what role they play in the business model.
• Tactical: what policies, standards, plans, and indicators guide the asset portfolio.
• Operational: what is done every day on each specific asset and how learning occurs from that work.

Just as in human anatomy, knowing “the parts” does not guarantee a good diagnosis. Clinical tests and scans are of little use if the doctor cannot interpret them. With assets it is the same: data is the body, but interpretation and decisions are the medicine. Therefore, understanding the asset portfolio as a system and having talent capable of reading it is vital.

From this perspective, we can extract several key ideas.

Knowing assets is not the same as managing assets

Understanding how assets are designed, operated, maintained, and replaced is essential, but not enough. This technical knowledge describes physical behavior, but does not yet constitute integrated asset management.

Asset management begins when that knowledge is used to answer, consistently and traceably, questions such as: what must be done, when, and why—considering impact on value, risk, costs, and performance throughout the asset life cycle.

Assets form complex, dynamic systems

Assets do not operate in isolation:

• They form complex and interdependent systems, where failures often propagate in cascades.
• System behavior is dynamic: it changes with demand, environment, operation, and historical decisions.
• Assets with very different useful lives coexist within the same system.

From a systems-thinking perspective, the conclusion is clear: It makes no sense to optimize individual equipment if the effect on the entire system is not understood. Asset management requires seeing patterns, relationships, and feedback loops—not just local KPIs.

Assets don’t speak: data and human judgment

Physical assets do not “tell” their condition or how much risk they represent. To give them a voice it is necessary to:

• Monitor their condition and environment.
• Generate reliable data.
• Analyze and relate them.
• Formulate diagnostics.

But here lies the critical point: data alone manages nothing. As in human anatomy, a set of tests is of little use if there is no professional capable of interpreting them.
In asset management, it is not the sensor that decides, but the person who understands what that data means within the system, with technical, operational, and economic context.

Human talent as a critical asset

This perspective reveals the value of human knowledge:

• People define what data is collected and for what purpose.
• They interpret trends, identify patterns, and distinguish noise from signal.
• They connect technical information with risk, cost, and business objectives.
• And they manage tensions between areas when resources are insufficient.

Across the three levels of asset management:

• Strategic: leaders capable of viewing the asset portfolio as a system and making coherent investment and risk decisions.
• Tactical: profiles that translate that strategy into aligned policies, plans, criticalities, and indicators.
• Operational: teams that know the assets closely, detect anomalies, propose improvements, and feed the system with quality data.

Without this human —technical, contextual, and organizational— knowledge, assets remain “black boxes” and data, a volume of information difficult to use.

The hidden core: orchestrating system value

The Anatomy also highlights challenges that are not immediately visible:

• Defining what “value” means for each stakeholder (operations, finance, safety, environment, regulator, customer).
• Understanding how assets generate that value over time, not just how much they cost.
• Integrating activities and perspectives (maintenance, operations, projects, procurement, finance) to maximize system value, not the value of an isolated area.

The focus shifts from “what is the technically correct intervention” to:
what combination of decisions maximizes system value, given our risk appetite and resource constraints.

Decisions, risk, and competition for resources

Asset management is exercised in a real environment, with:

• Internal competition for budget, shutdowns, and personnel.
• Different sensitivities to risk.
• The need for explicit decision rules.

For an analytical profile, the message is clear: data only changes reality if the organization has shared criteria to convert them into decisions (what gets done, what gets postponed, and what will not be done) and reviews those criteria with the same discipline with which it reviews its indicators.

Changing the narrative: from cost to value driver

Finally, the Anatomy invites us to change the way assets are discussed in the company:

• While they are perceived as an inevitable general expense, short-term cost-cutting decisions will be prioritized.
• When they are recognized as key actors in the value chain, it makes sense to invest in data, analysis, monitoring, renewal, and capability development.

The uncomfortable but necessary question for an analytical organization is:

Are we using our data, models, and experience to transform how we make decisions about our assets, or only to justify decisions that were traditionally made?

The answer to that question reveals much more about the real maturity of asset management than any certificate or tool featured on the cover.

To close, it is worth adding that although many of the ideas discussed come from the 2015 edition of Asset Management – an Anatomy by IAM, in July 2024 Version 4 was published. This edition does not contradict this approach; rather, it reinforces and expands it, aligning it with ISO 55001:2024, digital transformation, and the concept of data as an asset itself, as well as with current sustainability and ESG challenges.

This new edition maintains the core message explained above, but situates it in the contemporary context of organizations increasingly dependent on quality information, robust decision-making models, and human talent capable of interpreting that “anatomy” in real time.

ISO 55000:2024 as a framework

The updated family of standards works as follows:

• ISO 55000:2024: provides an overview, vocabulary, principles, outcomes, and expected benefits of asset management.
• ISO 55001:2024: defines the requirements of the asset management system, with the typical structure of management systems (context, leadership, planning, support, operation, performance evaluation, and improvement).

ISO itself makes it clear that it does not impose a single step-by-step model for management: it provides the framework and the blocks that must exist; each organization designs its model according to its context and assets.

Phases of physical asset management

ISO 55000:2024 emphasizes two ideas:

• the entire life cycle of assets must be covered, and
• there must be a management system based on principles and continuous improvement.

Physical asset life cycle

A practical model that can be used is:

Planning and strategic alignment

• Translate business strategy into asset needs: capacity, reliability, safety, regulatory compliance.
• Define service levels, acceptable risks, and investment criteria.

Design and evaluation of alternatives

• Evaluate technological solutions and asset configurations.
• Analyze the asset life cycle cost and the value contributed.

Acquisition, construction, and installation

• Purchase, build, or install assets based on technical and life cycle criteria.
• Commission and test to ensure compliance with requirements.
• Register the asset in the system (hierarchy, criticality, master data).

Operation and maintenance

• Operate the asset within its design limits.
• Execute maintenance strategies (corrective, preventive, predictive, condition-based, or risk-based).
• Monitor performance: availability, reliability, costs, quality, safety, environmental impact.

Renewal, rehabilitation, and retirement

• Decide when to renew, modernize, relocate, or retire an asset.
• Manage end-of-life safely and sustainably.
• Capture lessons learned to improve future planning and design decisions.

If you only manage the operation and maintenance stage well, you are practicing maintenance management. To speak of asset management, you must govern all phases.

When to apply asset management?

Asset management becomes especially relevant when:

• The company is asset-intensive (industrial plants, infrastructure networks, utilities).
• The cost of failures or downtime is high in terms of safety, environment, reputation, or economic impact.
• Regulators, insurers, or shareholders pressure for demonstrated risk control and efficient use of resources.
• The asset base is aging or growing rapidly, and reactive maintenance is no longer enough.
• The organization wants to move toward sustainable, data-driven operation integrating analytics, IoT, AI, and EAM/CMMS platforms.

In organizations with few assets and low risk, basic principles are sufficient. In sectors such as energy, oil and gas, mining, or transportation, a formal system aligned with ISO 55000:2024 / UNE-ISO 55000:2025 becomes a competitive and governance factor.

Conclusions

Physical asset management represents a profound shift in the way asset-intensive organizations are led: it moves from “fixing equipment” to orchestrating a complete system of strategic, tactical, and operational decisions based on value, risk, and performance across the life cycle.

ISO 55000:2024 provides the framework, the IAM Anatomy helps understand the internal logic of the discipline, and daily practice in maintenance and reliability brings it to life. The real leap lies not only in adopting standards or platforms, but in developing talent capable of reading the “anatomy” of their assets, interpreting data with judgment, and building coherent decision rules.

Organizations that manage to align these elements will be the ones that turn their physical assets into a sustained source of competitiveness, safety, and resilience over time.

References

1. Institute of Asset Management (IAM) (2015). Anatomía de la gestión de activos (3° ed.). https://theiam.org/media/2908/iam-gesti%C3%B3n-de-activos-una-anatom%C3%ADa-anatomy.pdf
2. Institute of Asset Management (IAM) (2024). Anatomía de la gestión de activos (4° ed.).
3. https://theiam.org/knowledge-library/asset-management-an-anatomy
4. ISO 55000:2024 (es). Gestión de activos- Vocabulario, aspectos generales y principios. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:55000:ed-2:v1:es
5. The Maximo Guy (2025). Maximo Work Order & Asset Management para principiantes: Tutorial completo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUT5ZbSZaMk