Make facilities last forever | Smart asset management plans

We all live, learn, work and play in our facilities and expect that many will be used well ‘into the future’. Planning longer-term leads to ‘smarter’ Asset Management Plans. Where a Facilities Management Plan could be for one or a number of buildings within a portfolio — an Asset Management Plan considers the financial implications of long-term asset ownership across the entire portfolio at various levels including governance, strategy, tactics and operations.

An Asset Management Plan (AMP) is the end result of many tasks undertaken by an organisation to manage its portfolio of assets. Asset management means different things to different people in different industries. However, ISO 55000 has clarified this as it defines what’s meant by an Asset Management Plan and a Strategic Asset Management Plan. To simplify across the different facilities-based industries, think about asset management as a way to ‘make facilities last forever’ — assuming there is an on-going need for these facilities. The challenge is to implement the processes in a ‘smart’ way that makes a tangible difference. Smarter asset management adds value to the organisation, rather than being seen as a cost.

Facilities that last forever

When there is an on-going need for a facility, it can be maintained to perpetuity. Recognising that most buildings won’t and shouldn’t last forever, business processes are in place to provide evidence to support any type of decision with confidence. This is the point of asset management planning: as organisational objectives and strategies change, the asset portfolio must align with these changes. It is the asset manager’s role to have the data, systems, processes and people in place — and knowing the financial, risk, and people implications of making asset-related decisions — in a smart way.

What is a 'smart Asset Management Plan'?

A smart Asset Management Plan will be produced from having a good planning framework and working to a ‘hierarchy of care’ that would enable a facility to ‘last forever’:

Asset planning framework:

• Accurate asset register.
• Assessing the condition and lifecycle of components.
• Analysis of current and future needs based on standards and policies.
• Plan what should be done to address risk and achieve the organisation’s goals.
• Decide on priority projects while recognising the implications of deferred works.
• Implement the projects.
• Feed the resulting information back into the asset register and update the Asset Management Plans.

The hierarchy of care:

• Operations — providing water, power and data.
• Maintaining safety aligned with the building code.
• Maintaining a healthy environment with cleaning, security and pest control.
• Expectations from building users/occupants — Reactive maintenance — if it breaks, then fix it.
• Extending life of components with planned preventative maintenance — wash downs, filter replacements, and painting programmes.
• Lifecycle planning with renewals, replacements and refurbishments of components and spaces.
• Adapting to change with extensions, reconfigurations and upgrades.

How to make this work - what now?

Smarter Asset Management Plans need to make a difference. They need to drive the project-level decision-making process — with or without having component level data or evidence. There are two approaches we often talk about at SPM Assets - as well as a hybrid of them. Read more about them here.