EAM NXT 2020 Speaker Profiles: Tim Vangsgaard Hansen

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The landscape of asset management is changing. As digital transformation is taking over the manufacturing industry, enhancing efficiency and monitoring the performance of assets becomes crucial. Increasingly organizations are investing in innovative technologies such as IoT, AI and ML to ensure live and continuous visibility for their physical assets. All this change leads to one major question: Is your EAM strategy competent enough to provide a competitive edge for your organisation?

At EAM NXT 2020, our new business platform dedicated to B2B enterprise asset management, we brought the experts from various fields to tackle this question from several angles, digital transformation, strategic asset management and competence development. In efforts to dig into these topics before EAM NXT 2020, we interviewed Tim Vangsgaard Hansen, the Strategic Asset Manager at Copenhagen Airports and one of the speakers at our event. Tim shared insights on the complexities of his role and the hottest trends in asset management. Enjoy.

As the Strategic Asset Manager at Copenhagen Airports, can you briefly describe what your role entails? What is your number one priority? What is a typical day in your work week looks like?

I would say my main task is to offer consultation to the management; namely to the asset management leadership, CTO and his directors. My priority is to develop our strategic framework for asset management and inspire by bringing in new ideas.

My days are filled mostly with meetings, discussions regarding the scope of asset management strategy and execution of asset management strategy depending on stats. I will also participate in Asset Management networking meetings at EAM Nxt for inspiration and having meaningful discussions with my peers.

It seems like you are tackling a lot of tasks with different stakeholders. How do you plan your time?

It depends; I prioritize the most important (agreed with mgmt. team) tasks along with the ones with the closest deadline. (I have my main focus on strategic tasks and Longterm projects)

What are the challenges you face as a Strategic Asset Manager? And how do you tackle them?

I would say, my biggest challenge is the organizational culture. Airports are very operation-oriented in their mindsets. Copenhagen Airport is not an exception and we are very good at quickly solving issues. However, we would like to implement more long-term thinking. We want to move away from operational, short-term focus and step into long-term the focus of generating data in our asset management systems.

Also, we are updating our intrinsic systems along with our ERP system but still, we need to work towards creating awareness on what is important and why.

I believe both issues are very common in the field of asset management and we are working on it. Nonetheless, there is room for improvement.

The manufacturing sector is going through a lot of change with servitization/ digital transformation. If I asked you to define the state of your industry briefly, how would you define it?

Normally the asset or maintenance managers are concerned with the assets themselves rather than the processes that involve them. In production, it’s easier to manage as there are fewer assets involved. However, in facilities, there is a wide variation of assets. Therefore, the processes and the scope of assets need to be aligned.

Perhaps more importantly, the responsibility of asset managers must be matched with the value-creating processes rather than the area of expertise. The idea is to have more people look at value flows across assets, rather than optimizing the asset system. This can, of course, cause some problems in regards to organisational culture, as it can lead to allowing supply-chain people to manage engineers.

What are the biggest trends in Enterprise Asset Management now? Why is that? And how will they evolve in the future?

IoT, ML/AI and Predictive Maintenance are the ones that are being talked about the most. Wide-spread usage of these technologies will make reduce the ambiguity around these fancy words. IoT is basically the same as a BMS system that we have known for decades. It’s just that the models we can build based on it are easier to apply with IoT.

ML/AI will be more commonly used in maintenance as well. The thing that concerns me is how these new technologies will be perceived in more conservative and old organizations. I think we need to see some peers go-ahead with these technologies and others will follow in time.

What made you decide to speak at EAM NXT 2020?

Meeting with peers and sharing ideas.

Any message you want to share the participants of EAM NXT 2020?

Technology is here to help not scare us…