Sustainable performance of industrial assets: the role of PAS 55-1&2 and human factors

Asset-intensive organisations are under rising pressure from their stakeholders to realise the optimum level of exploiting assets to achieve a balanced and sustainable performance (SP) over their life cycle. However, industrial organisational structures delineated along traditional disciplines fail to provide an asset-centric focus. Accomplishing SP in an asset-intensive organisation depends on the ability of the human authority in an organisational hierarchy to maintain different asset operations align with sustainable considerations. The level of physical assets' integrity in a particular industrial setting depends on the personnel ability for acquisition, exploitation (includes design and operation), maintenance, modification and disposal of critical assets and properties within the limits of universally accepted norms. Thus, human factor (HF) is a central measure to evaluate the 'integrity' of physical assets in asset management as the 'integrity' is a characteristic that human beings can have. The publically available specification (PAS) which is published by British Standards Institution (BSI) provides specification (PAS-1) and guidelines (PAS-2) for managing integrity of physical assets towards SP. This manuscript demonstrates the role of PAS 5-1&2 and HFs achieving SP. It also proposes a framework and its implementation methodology to mitigate unwanted events due to human errors leading to organisational weaknesses.