Engineering Manager, Rick Scott, asks 'how do we make the right decisions in a fast-moving world?'
Engineering has always been about innovative solutions to technical challenges. Asset Integrity Management (AIM) provides the opportunity to apply engineering to the problems of maintaining equipment, utilities, and estate in an environmentally and economically sustainable manner.
AIM is a well-recognised discipline. There are many ways of describing it: broadly speaking it covers a system’s effective performance, its reliability, and its safety, and it can be considered at all stages of a life cycle.
Over recent years, external factors have presented many new dimensions to the decisions we make in AIM: Brexit and the uncertainty around international trade relations, our obligation to deliver Net Zero and the growth of transition engineering as a discipline, and most recently the events in Ukraine. The latter brings into stark clarity the importance of security of supply, and costs to consumers. How do we make the right decisions in a fast-moving world?
Technology is trying to keep pace: digitalisation is playing its role through the Internet of Things; digital twins are providing greater and quicker insight into the state of systems now and into many possible futures, helping to inform our decision-making. Rather than technology reducing the workload on our engineering teams, it is changing the workload. It is placing greater onus on their ability to orchestrate more complex workflows, embrace and implement emerging technologies, and assess the benefits and risks of many more decision options.
It really is an exciting time to have a career in engineering and every day it gets more rewarding and more important. Good ‘AIM’ is always necessary to ensure organisations can hit their business targets.