The United Kingdom-based Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) has granted accreditation to the Msc in Engineering Asset Management (EAM), offered by the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at The UWI’s Faculty of Engineering. This means that all the Department’s three undergraduate programmes and four of its Master’s programmes are now fully accredited by IMechE.
Students completing an IMechE accredited degree are deemed to have met, part or all, of the academic requirements for registration as a Chartered or Incorporated Engineer, and are in a strong position to move on to achieve professional engineering status after a period of initial professional development in industry, says the IMechE.
Engineering Asset Management is an inter-disciplinary field that combines the technical issues of asset reliability, safety and performance with financial and managerial skills. In today’s environment, that is an essential combination for both sustainability and competitiveness. According to Professor Chanan Syan of the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at The UWI, EAM’s emphasis is on applying holistic, systematic and risk-based processes to decisions concerning the physical assets of an organization.
He explains that physical assets include buildings and fixed plant, mobile equipment and civil, electrical and mechanical infrastructure. The domain of EAM is the optimization of the value of the investments in physical assets of the company.
“This would seem to be eminently sensible if one considers the enormous amounts of money invested in these assets in capital intensive enterprises” he says. “However, it is only in recent times that attention has been paid by higher echelons of management to this opportunity. Clearly, getting the best out of the assets in terms of their ability to support corporate objectives, extend useful life, and minimize costs, has a direct beneficial impact on the bottom line.”
He said that recognizing this value has meant that organizations now pay much more attention to this discipline and its practitioners. It has also meant that an asset manager must now have a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical skills in a range of engineering and management areas.
Citing examples of sectors which have benefited from adopting EAM, such as petrochemical, process, energy and general engineering and manufacturing, Professor Syan noted that these sectors have high levels of investment in assets and therefore require high levels of availability and reliability at lowest costs.
He said that Caribbean countries are now in a development phase where the majority of their industrial and economic activities comprise of procuring plant and assets, and using these to produce value-added products and services locally and internationally. He noted that there has been no capacity building in EAM regionally and so, most organizations have had to rely on “offshore” expertise.
He is confident that the MSc programme developed by his department—the first certified one of its kind regionally—will develop the needed skills.
Basically, it consists of nine compulsory courses, three electives and an industrial project. The courses include Strategic Asset Management; Asset Management Technologies; Work Planning and Scheduling; Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics; Maintenance Analysis and Optimization; Maintainability Engineering and Management; Asset Reliability Management; Human Resource Management; Research Methods; Asset Performance Management; Reliability Centered Maintenance; Project Management; Health, Safety and the Environment; Total Quality Management and a final project.
Applications for the next intake close on February 28, 2014 for all postgraduate study and undergraduate applications are open until March 31, 2014.
For further information, please contact the Production Engineering and Management Office, Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, The Faculty of Engineering, UWI, St Augustine campus. Telephone: 662-2002, Ext. 82067. |
