Tools and Techniques for Better Lifecycle Management

In service-oriented businesses, real property – land, buildings, and infrastructure – is typically the second largest budget item following human resources. While complicated, an asset lifecycle management plan ensures that your portfolio is properly suited to meeting your mission requirements, and not an unnecessary drain on scarce resources.

Fortunately, there are commercially available or customizable enterprise-oriented toolsets to help you develop and maintain the complex decision support structures of a sound asset lifecycle management plan. This article looks at the main categories of such tools, and how to select the type of system that’s best for your needs.

Current enterprise asset management systems for real property typically are subdivided into two related areas:

• Computer Assisted Facilities Management (CAFM), sometimes called Total Infrastructure and Facilities Management (TIFM), and
• Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) sometimes called Integrated Work Management Systems (IWMS).

Both categories of tools routinely overlap and provide capabilities across management needs. CAFM or TIFM tools are generally geared toward facility and infrastructure inventory, utilization, and control. CMMS or IWMS tools are more focused on work order and maintenance activities. The tools and processes that fall under each of these two areas are the basis for a robust enterprise asset management capability.

Some enterprise software solutions combine these capabilities into single platforms, allowing managers of large portfolios to choose from various menus of capabilities. These capabilities include modeling and scenario building, creation of customized reports and dashboards, and interoperability with industry-standard Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Computer Assisted Drafting and Design (CADD) software.

Let’s move on to the question portfolio managers must ask themselves before selecting the appropriate system for collecting and storing asset data. The question may seem simple: What kind of information is necessary to make the best management decisions, and how much of that information is sufficient for the decision process?

This seemingly simple question is critical, however. If you’re keeping track of more data points than you need (or may ever need), then you’re making your work needlessly complicated – and you’re driving up the costs of data while decreasing its overall utility. Let’s consider the following categories of variables in planning for an improved decision support capability:

• For owners of large portfolios, the economies of scale may increase by an order of magnitude. For example, the cost to deploy a service-level management system might be as low as $ 0.04 per square foot. The total cost involved in deploying such systems may be multiples higher, however, depending on factors including the number of assets, the nature of information to be collected, the means of collection, and the type and complexity of the analyses to be performed.
• Before choosing a toolset, you must first decide which assets will be inventoried and their associated data fields, how the data will be entered, and the reports to be supported by this data. You also need to understand whether the processes of gathering and storing this information will affect efficiencies in other areas of work, and if so, how. Portfolio managers must know the range of decisions to be supported by the asset management system, and make sure that processes and procedures allow users to access that information quickly and easily.
• Data collection processes to support the new system should ideally reduce (even eliminate) current data collection and validation practices, or create only minimal additional requirements. For information that is not generated automatically, asset managers should make sure to add new collection activities into routine work flows to minimize disruption to established routines and procedures.
• Most commercially available CAFM and CMMS systems for large portfolio management have hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of preinstalled reports available. These reports may be sufficient to support routine management decisions.
• As portfolio managers, you should be well versed in the information flow required to support routine decisions and ensure that these reports are identified and readily available to system users. It is both time and cost prohibitive to determine the reports you’ll need by trial and error.

Of course, there’s much more to selecting an enterprise-class decision support system for asset lifecycle management than can be explained in this article alone. By understanding your requirements, however – and by knowing the type of data that’s necessary and sufficient for supporting your decisions – you will be better prepared to select a system that will be best suited to your particular lifecycle management needs.