Senior Manager - Technical Asset Management
Department: Operations
Reports to: VP Operations
Location: London office base with frequent national and international travel
Role type: Permanent, full time. Occasional extended hours and callouts due to operational needs, incidents and emergencies.
ABOUT THE ROLE
The Senior Manager -Technical Asset Management owns the Asset Management and Maintenance Management processes across all Polar sites. The role ensures Polar knows what assets it owns, where they are, what condition they are in, what maintenance they need and when they will need replacing, and that maintenance is appropriate to each asset's criticality and condition.
You will own the group maintenance strategy and standards: defining asset criticality, setting the maintenance regime for each asset class and determining what spares must be held, based on failure history, condition data and lifecycle position.
At each site, the outsourced FM contractor delivers the day-to-day PPM programme, scheduling and recording of maintenance work. This role does not duplicate that. You will own the group standard the contractor maintains to, set the requirements, audit execution and record quality, and hold them to account. You are the single point of authority on what maintenance is required, and to what standard, across Polar.
The role initially has no direct reports and delivers through influence. As Polar grows it may become a line management position, so you should be comfortable as an individual contributor now and potentially leading others in future.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Asset Management
- Act as Process Owner for Asset Management across all sites, owning and improving the policy, procedures, registration standards, naming and tagging conventions, data quality standards and ServiceNow configuration.
- Own the group asset register, ensuring it is accurate, complete and current, including data captured correctly at project handover so new sites and equipment enter the register complete.
- Define the asset criticality framework and the data standard for asset records (manufacturer, model, serial number, location, warranty, firmware, maintenance regime, expected life and condition).
- Own the asset lifecycle from procurement and commissioning to decommissioning and disposal.
- Monitor condition and performance data, identify assets deteriorating or approaching end of life, and provide the analysis behind capital replacement planning.
- Define and report on Asset Management KPIs, and conduct or commission periodic physical asset verification at each site.
- Work with Finance to align the asset register with the fixed asset register and support capitalisation, depreciation and componentisation decisions.
Maintenance Management
- Own the group maintenance strategy, standards and PPM programme, ensuring every asset has a documented regime proportionate to its criticality.
- Define maintenance task content, including task lists, acceptance criteria, recording requirements and pass/fail thresholds.
- Review and challenge manufacturer recommendations, owning the technical justification and any warranty agreements where Polar deviates from them.
- Own the critical spares strategy based on criticality, lead times and failure probability, reviewing holdings as the estate grows.
- Define and report on Maintenance Management KPIs, including PPM completion and compliance, backlog, first-time fix rate and reactive versus planned ratio.
- Analyse defect data across sites to identify poor reliability and adjust regimes, spares or replacement plans accordingly.
- Own the condition monitoring strategy, including predictive techniques and action thresholds.
- Ensure maintenance is controlled through Change Management with due regard to redundancy, customer notification and operational risk, and that PPM programmes are live in ServiceNow in time for new site operations.
FM Contractors and Suppliers
- Set the group standards the FM contractor must follow at every site, and ensure their site procedures and schedules align to them.
- Monitor PPM completion and compliance, audit records and data quality, and intervene where standards slip.
- Assure the competence of contractor and specialist personnel working on Polar assets.
- Hold the contractor to account constructively, elevate where performance does not improve, and retain the authority to reject records or require re-work.
- Manage vendors and specialist contractors, ensuring accurate asset information and challenging disproportionate maintenance scope, frequency and pricing.
- Ensure asset and maintenance obligations are embedded in supplier and FM contracts, and that data from all sites flows into ServiceNow.
- Work closely with Incident, Problem and Change Management peers, the Service Operations Director, and the Design and Construction team to improve reliability, control change and ensure new assets are specified and documented for long-term operation.
- Build strong relationships across operations, technical, quality, security, compliance, health and safety, finance and procurement.
- Train site teams, FM partners and vendors on asset data standards and maintenance requirements.
- Represent Asset and Maintenance Management in customer meetings, audits, insurance inspections and certification activities.
- Report on asset status, condition, maintenance performance and lifecycle planning to VP Operations and the management team.
- As the function grows, recruit, develop and lead direct reports in line with Polar values.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Experience
- 10+ years in asset or maintenance management engineering, ideally in data centre, critical environment, utility or heavy industry settings.
- Defining maintenance strategies and PPM regimes for critical M&E assets, including content, frequencies and acceptance criteria.
- Building and maintaining an asset register at scale across multiple sites.
- Defining asset criticality frameworks linked to maintenance regimes, spares strategies and lifecycle planning.
- Substantial experience managing an outsourced FM contractor and supplier/vendor relationships, including challenging scope and pricing.
- Practical experience of a CMMS or EAM platform, ideally ServiceNow.
- Condition monitoring and predictive maintenance in a critical environment.
- Working with Finance on capital asset accounting, componentisation, depreciation and lifecycle costing.
- Knowledge of asset management standards such as ISO 55000 is desirable.
- Experience in multinational teams, and experience of or genuine willingness to engage with the Nordic market and other locations as Polar grows.
- Line management experience, or a clear readiness to take it on.
- A relevant degree, ideally in engineering or a technical discipline, or equivalent industry experience.
- Strong working knowledge of data centre assets (electrical, cooling, power supply and generation, security, BMS, network and customer white space), enough to assess criticality, understand failure modes and engage credibly with engineers and vendors.
- Able to balance rigorous attention to detail on asset data with strategic judgement on what maintenance is genuinely necessary.
- A natural collaborator who holds suppliers and contractors to account firmly and fairly, and builds relationships that make compliance routine.
- Commercially minded, making evidence-based repair versus replace recommendations without compromising reliability.
- Persistent, keeping data quality and compliance on track while keeping others on side.
- Delivers through influence, and thrives in a fast-paced, privately owned start-up and scale-up environment on a self-start basis.
- High integrity, willing to report uncomfortable findings accurately.
- Strong analytical and numerical skills, turning large data sets into commercial and capital planning recommendations.
- Excellent written and verbal English, able to present technical analysis to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Highly proficient in Microsoft Office, particularly Excel, and quick to adopt new systems.
- Culturally aware and sensitive to different ways of working.
#J-18808-Ljbffr
