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ALIGNMENT BETWEEN ENGINEERING ASSET MANAGEMENT AND FINANCE

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Modern organizations, primarily business, have to strongly focus on a sound financial management and, then, shall demonstrate their profitability and financial sustainability. They are often capital intensive and procure their assets (such as various equipment, components, engineered systems, etc.) in order to deliver products and/or services. Contemporary trends show that this goal is efficiently achieved through a structured asset management. In accordance with ISO 55000 standard, asset management is defined as a coordinated activity of an organization to realize the value from assets. Although in theory the relationship between finance and engineering appears to be rather obvious, practice has revealed that organizations often suffer from a dichotomy between these two sectors. It is commonly due to lack of communication, suitable interactions, transparency, and understanding between people working in these two fields at all levels of organization. Consequently, it leads to their misalignment and potential internal struggles. Such situations may cause serious setbacks, losses, and ultimately could put organizations in jeopardy of survival. It is particularly true in the contemporary, strongly connected world, where operational and business environment is highly complex, rapidly changing, dynamic, and strongly competitive, typically involving deep epistemic uncertainties regarding scenarios and business outcomes. Additionally, modern organizations are fairly complex as per their internal structure, management, technological processes, operations, and deployed technologies, what adds to the overall complexity of the business environment. It appears that traditional methods in modelling such environments are less successful, and novel methodologies and concepts are required. The paper proposes a holistic approach based on combining traditional modelling methods and the theory of complexity aiming at efficiently aligning financial and engineering asset management of contemporary organizations. It enables their long-term sustainability and a high level of financial performance. Various means and methods are proposed and discussed to achieve this goal.
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