Overview for Leasing or Buying Decisions in Industrial Asset Management

One of the main interests for today's companies is to reduce the life cycle cost of those assets included in their productive processes. With that purpose, new business models are considering the acquisition of services provided by an asset, instead of the direct ownership of such asset. In other words, the focus is that the asset's ownership remains in the service supplier, since the company just purchases the results obtained using the asset during a specific period. This asset utilization is at the end of the day the value added by the asset to the productive process. With that idea, this contribution is intended to summarize an overview of factors in order to decide between "lease or buy" an industrial asset. The choice between buying or leasing an asset must take into account different aspects, all of them with advantages and disadvantages, that must provide finally a positive influence in the profit and loss statement. Together with this discussion, one of the factor to take into account is nowadays the new digital tools that come from the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4ID). These new tools (i.e. the IoT) support the asset management in a servitization context, contributing with big data analytics to facilitate the decision making in terms of criticality and reliability assessments as well as other decisions involved in the industrial asset management. In fact, the Digital Transformation may simplify the connection among system, process, asset and service, dealing with massive information interconnected among different assets, as well as different organizations like the asset user and the service supplier.