The project investigates the potential of Total Value and Cost of Ownership (TVO, TCO) for supporting the design and through-life management of industrial assets. Nowadays, TCO models are still poorly practiced in industry, in spite of their advantages. Further on, the flavor of the day in the industrial and academic world is to encourage innovative thinking to extract the maximum value from the assets, instead of thinking only about cost. Although the importance of value maximization in physical asset management is currently accepted, there are few works clarifying what value means, how to identify and quantify value, how to base decisions on it.
The purpose of this project was to study the evolution of TVO and TCO as used in industry and understood by academics. The Sustainowner framework is an innovative output of the project. In fact, it is the result of an integrated work that led to the synthetization of knowledge under a unique framework. Collaboration and information exchanges were possible thanks to the secondments done among the researchers involved in the project. The aim of Sustainowner project is to be a platform that can be used to define the Body of Knowledge on Asset Management.
The case studies indicated that the integration of AM is appreciated by organizations but its practical implementation is not fully supported by empirical evidence from the considered entities. Moreover, we found out that mechanisms have to be introduced so that the decision-making process within such system is faced through a life cycle perspective and through alignment among the strategic, tactic and operative control levels within an organization, involving the different stakeholders, towards the value creation from physical assets. Only by adopting these measures, sustainable value creation from assets can be ensured. The business cases resulted to be an important occasion of meeting with the industrial stakeholders and disseminate the project contents and objectives.
The implementation of workshops during the project show-cased innovative results. On one side, the workshops enabled to outline a number of evidence that confirmed the main findings from WP2 (business cases) and enabled enlarging the perspective. On the other hand, the workshops resulted in a successful mechanism to involve a high number of different industrial companies, most of them of relevant importance both for the local and global industries. One of the main impacts of the workshops was establishing networking of industrial companies around the project's field of study.
