Operations & Asset Management

Is there a defined asset management system, and is it written down which assets it covers and which it does not?

Organisations under compliance pressure frequently establish an asset management function before establishing what it is responsible for. The function then spends its first years discovering its own boundaries by finding assets nobody had allocated to anyone. Scope is the cheapest thing to define at the start and the most expensive thing to reconstruct later.

What to examine

• Ask for the documented scope of the asset management system and the boundaries and applicability used to set it.
• Identify asset classes falling outside it and establish whether that exclusion was decided or merely happened.
• Check the scope is available as documented information, which the standard requires.
• Test whether the system covers non-physical assets where the organisation depends on them.

Required by

• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 4.3, determining the scope of the asset management system, and Clause 4.4, asset management system.
• ISO 55000:2024, asset management vocabulary and overview.

Can any asset management objective be traced upwards to an organisational objective, and downwards to something someone is doing this year?

The strategic asset management plan is the document that makes asset management strategic rather than administrative, and it is the one most often produced to satisfy an assessor and then never referred to again. Where the line to organisational objectives is missing, maintenance budgets are set by last year plus a percentage, and no argument for investment can be made in terms the board recognises.

What to examine

• Trace one asset management objective up to an organisational objective and down to a funded activity. Breaks in this chain are usually at the top.
• Check the SAMP documents the role of the asset management system in meeting the objectives, which is what the clause asks for.
• Establish when it was last revised, and whether it changed anything.
• Confirm objectives are measurable and monitored, rather than aspirational statements.

Required by

• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 6.2.1, strategic asset management plan, given its own subclause in the second edition and listed by ISO among the main changes.
• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 6.2.2, asset management objectives, and 6.2.3, planning to achieve them.
• ISO 55011, guidance on the development of public policy to enable asset management.

Is the data the organisation makes decisions from of a quality anyone has determined, and does anyone know when it was last true?

Asset data degrades continuously and silently. Nothing announces that a record has stopped matching reality, so confidence in a register tends to rise with its age while its accuracy falls. The second edition responded by separating data and information from documented information and requiring that attributes, quality and sources be determined rather than assumed.

What to examine

• Ask what data quality standard has been determined. The absence of one is now a nonconformity rather than a maturity observation.
• Check when each significant data set was last verified against the physical asset, and by whom.
• Establish whether data requirements were derived from the decisions the data supports, or from what the system happened to have fields for.
• Test alignment of terminology between financial and non-financial data, which the clause requires explicitly.

Required by

• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 7.6, data and information, substantially revised in the second edition.
• ISO 55013, guidance on the management of asset data.
• ISO/TS 55010, alignment of financial and non-financial functions.

Accrual conversion gave three years. It did not give anyone a register.→

Is the asset management system itself audited, by people competent to audit it, on a programme derived from risk?

Where an internal audit function exists, its asset management coverage is often limited to maintenance spend and procurement compliance, because those are the parts that look like the rest of the audit universe. The system itself, meaning the decision-making framework, the SAMP, the data, goes unexamined. The organisation is then assured about its transactions and unassured about the basis on which it spends billions.

What to examine

• Read the internal audit plan and identify what proportion of assurance effort is directed at the asset base relative to its share of the balance sheet.
• Check whether the audit programme considers the importance of the processes concerned and the results of previous audits, which the clause requires.
• Establish whether the auditors are competent in asset management, or competent in audit and reading across.
• Confirm management review inputs include what the standard specifies, and that outputs changed something.

Required by

• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 9.1, monitoring, measurement, analysis and evaluation, Clause 9.2, internal audit, and Clause 9.3, management review.
• Global Internal Audit Standards, Institute of Internal Auditors, effective 9 January 2025.
• The Three Lines Model, Institute of Internal Auditors, as revised in the Statement of Position of 8 July 2026.

Programme risk is not the sum of its functions→

Does the organisation act on what it expects to happen, or only on what has already happened?

This is the clearest signal of intent in the 2024 revision. Preventive action, which asked what might go wrong, has been renamed predictive action and rewritten, which shifts the question towards when to intervene rather than whether to. For an asset-owning organisation that is a different discipline: it requires condition data, deterioration modelling and a funding mechanism that can act before failure. Most organisations have none of the three and describe their run-to-failure regime as risk-based.

What to examine

• Ask for one intervention whose timing was set by predicted condition rather than by failure, calendar or budget availability.
• Check whether renewal, replacement and disposal timing is optimised together or handled by separate teams on separate cycles.
• Establish whether the data required to predict anything is actually being collected, and at what interval.
• Test whether deferred maintenance is quantified and reported anywhere the board sees it.

Required by

• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 10.3, predictive action, renamed from preventive action and fully technically revised, and listed by ISO among the main changes from the 2014 edition.
• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 10.1, continual improvement, and Clause 10.2, nonconformity and corrective action.

Do the finance function and the engineering function describe the same asset base in terms that reconcile?

These two functions hold the same assets in different systems, at different breakdowns, for different purposes, and rarely have any obligation to agree. The consequence is not a reconciliation problem, it is a decision problem: capital allocation happens in the financial view, deterioration happens in the technical one, and nothing translates between them. This has its own technical specification precisely because it is common enough to need one.

What to examine

• Take the total asset value from the financial statements and the asset population from the maintenance system, and attempt a reconciliation. Record how long it takes and who has to be involved.
• Check whether the two functions share an asset hierarchy, or maintain separate ones nobody maps.
• Establish whether a proposed renewal can be expressed in both views without manual translation.
• Confirm whether accrual conversion, where it applies, produced a register the engineers recognise.

Required by

• ISO/TS 55010, guidance on the alignment of the financial and non-financial functions in asset management.
• ISO 55001:2024, Clause 7.6, requiring alignment of financial and non-financial terminology and data traceability.
• ISO 55000:2024, which states alignment among the principles of asset management.
• IPSAS 33, first-time adoption of accrual basis IPSAS.

Accrual conversion gave three years. It did not give anyone a register.→