The Engineering Journey to Excellence
The Practical Asset Management Framework - all eight books in one volume.
Twenty-eight years of consulting practice on operating sites - open pit, underground, alluvial, plant - distilled into one working manual. The complete eight-pillar framework, from the strategic Operating Model through to the integration, capability, and sustainment work that turns the technical pillars into a working operation.
261 pages · 90+ diagrams · 107-term consolidated glossary · ISO 55001:2024 aligned
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The PDF edition is DRM-free and full-color; the hardcover and paperback are printed and shipped by Lulu.
What's in the volume
Book I - The Operating Model. Governance, RACI, PDCA, and management review.
Book II - Asset Criticality. Risk-based classification that drives every downstream decision.
Book III - Maintenance Tactics. FMECA, RCM, and the Six Tactic Types.
Book IV - Work Management. The Six-Step Process and the wrench-time discipline.
Book V - Defect Elimination. Bad Actor program and the structured DE process.
Book VI - Asset Performance Management. KPIs, OEE, the leading-vs-lagging twin lenses.
Book VII - Understanding Lean and Six Sigma. The diagnostic toolkit.
Book VIII - Integration, People, and Sustainment. Cross-pillar flows, the Eighth Pillar, the Sustainment Rhythm.
Why I wrote this
For most of my career I've watched plants struggle with the same problems - high reactive ratios, PMs that don't prevent failures, defects that recur, audits that find the same things year after year.
The literature didn't help. Asset management textbooks treated the topic as compliance theory. The vendor handbooks pitched their software as the answer. The standards (ISO 55001, the SAE JA series) gave the right principles but no operational detail. What was missing was a practitioner's manual - written by someone who'd actually walked the floor at 6 AM and tried to make a PM compliance number move.
So I wrote the books I wished had been on my desk twenty years ago. Eight pillars. Five maturity stages. The methods that I've seen work, the pitfalls I've seen kill programs, and the language to talk about asset management with the people whose hands actually do the work.
- Johan Nortje, NJN Consulting