TOTAL ASSET MANAGEMENT: INTEGRATING THE PROJECT MANAGEMENT & ASSET MANAGEMENT SUPPLY CHAINS

Abstract

The construction industry is one characterized by high fragmentation, low productivity, cost and time overruns, and conflicts; inefficiency has thus been a persistent feature of the industry. No doubt, models and concepts have been formulated to address these inefficiencies; they are mainly focused for specific segments of the Construction Supply Chain (CSC), the Project Management (PM) and Asset Management (AM), without any formalised proposal for cross supply chain integration, known as Total Asset Management (TAM). Yet, the lack of assimilation between the PM and AM supply chains contributes largely to the inadequacies of the construction industry, as there is no direct and seamless flow from the Design and Construction (D&C) stage to Operations and Maintenance (O&M) stage. This research aims to study the potential activities, integration forces, common goals and stakeholders that could extract better value and synergies through integration, hence contributing to the knowledge of TAM, leading to the formulation of applicable strategies for TAM and promoting its adoption. This was performed by way of analyzing the perceptions of industry practitioners collected via a survey questionnaire. It was found that all the integration of the 10 activities across PM and AM- “Sharing Relevant Information”, “Addressing Sustainability Issues”, “Similar Procurement Protocols”, “Better Life Cycle Optimization Opportunities”, “Overlapping Supply Chain Networks”, “Arranging for Linked Resource Pools”, “Expanded Long-term Business Opportunities”, “Integrated Team Building”, “Joint Use of ICT Tools” and “Integrated BCM Opportunities”, have potential capacity for extracting cross supply chain synergies. Relational Integration was also found to be the most preferred approach towards integration followed by Functional Integration then Transactional Integration. Lastly, Clients, Main Contractors and Designers/Main Consultants were rated as the top 3 most important stakeholders in both the PM and AM supply chains for the extraction of value for TAM.