Quora Answer: What is the Difference between Asset & Configuration Management?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is the difference between asset and configuration management?”

Aside from the “asset” in the name, these two have absolutely nothing in common.  There are two kinds of asset management.  In the normal sense, it refers to the management, meaning the maintenance, the utilisation and the process of managing an actual physical asset such as property, vessels, or equipment.

In the finance industry, it is the management of both tangible and intangible assets that contribute to earnings.  Tangible assets would include inventory for sale, real estate and equipment. Intangible assets would include the goodwill of the business, the debt and equity instruments, and other financial instruments.  Both also include cash in various forms from physical cash to deposits to money market.

Configuration management, on the other hand, is simply the name of a specific engineering process, which governs the currency, the management, the maintenance and even the disposal of a product’s performance, to maximise value by adhering to configurations where performance is optimal.  We normally use this for complex machinery and systems, with stringent requirements for running over an extended deployment period.  This includes the military, power generation, mining, and even manufacturing processes.