Practices of Managing Operational Assets of Foreign Infrastructure Companies

Capital-intensive industries compose the largest part of the global economy, using a lot of physical assets in order to produce goods and services. As any created business they aim at profit maximization and bringing more value to its stakeholders. Using the facilities daily calls for appropriate maintenance of the equipment to reduce enormous unpredictable costs due to unexpected breakdown or just equipment obsolescence. One way of doing so is to use strategic operational asset management – an actively developing concept which is widely used by infrastructure companies in order to become more efficient, more competent in managing existing assets and make their performance more predictable. The electricity industry is one of the capital-intensive industries and the basement of economy functioning. For the last decades, the competitive environment of electricity market changes drastically, implying contradictions in companies’ business goals. Nowadays it is essential not only to provide a high level of reliability and service, but also to be cost-effective, so electricity companies are challenged on an everyday basis and need revolutionary changes. Even though academicians, as well as industry experts, developed a lot of strategies and method of operational asset management, there is still no systematization of these strategies that the management of the companies could use for improving the companies’ performance. Using the strategy matrix could help the management to choose the most appropriate strategy of operational asset management basing on companies own opportunities, existing resources, strategic goals and interest of stakeholders. Therefore, the main goal of our project is to propose the modernization of the matrix of choice of the strategy for managing production assets or its elements based on the analysis of the best international experience of foreign infrastructure companies, as well as the offer of management solutions to increase the value of companies. The theoretical basis for the study is the academic articles and industrial researches of local and global organizations in the field strategic management and electricity industry. The most famous are works of such authors, as N. Hasting, R. Brown, B. Humphrey, Mitchell, Maletič, Nortman, Schwan, Kaplan and others. Regarding the methodology of the actual research, several methods will be applied. Firstly, the author will perform the qualitative analysis of foreign companies experience in implementing and a future use of an operational assets management systems. Secondly, the author will choose best practices of operational asset management that will be analyzed in detail, especially regarding financial performance and cost efficiency. That analysis will help the author to develop a strategy matrix of management decisions that should be made depending on the different input conditions. Moreover, strategies of moving from one matrix cell to another will be proposed. The final part of the study will be devoted to approbation of the developed matrix on the Russian electricity company in order to check if the matrix works on the Russian electricity market.