Last week I wrote about the influence that software has had on the evolution of Facility Condition Assessments (FCAs) and focused on the first of the three key functions that you want to make sure you have and the importance of leveraging your Capital Asset Management Software (CAMS) to standardize key data to support greater consistency.
Today I will round out the software discussion by outlining the importance of being able to build capital plans within the software and having the ability to streamline data management over time.
As I have said many times, getting an FCA is not getting a capital plan. It is a list of needs. In order to leverage your data and maximize the value of your CAMS system, you need to be able to use it to build multiyear, prioritized capital plans. If your CAMS does not have an efficient planning functionality, it may be simpler to extract data to an Excel spreadsheet and do it there. However, the ideal situation is that you can build your plans right in your CAMS, so you don’t have to go back later to reconcile completed projects “from scratch” in the software.
How you prioritize (pick one project over another) your capital plans is also a critical aspect to telling your AM story. You want a CAMS system that will allow you to integrate your organization’s overall goals and objectives, and risk tolerances and management strategies into your planning process. However, it is also critical to remember that any priority calculation is not a decision-making tool, it is a decision support tool.
All CAMS systems will have a built-in categorical priority system. However, today’s world generally requires a more robust (numerical) priority system. Most clients run out of money while trying to address which high priority is higher than the rest. That is where numerical priority applied to your recommendations allows you to rank order your “needs” when building a plan.
There are many justifications that you may use to pick a specific capital project. Some (in lots of cases many) may have nothing to do with addressing Deferred Capital Renewal and Maintenance (DCRM). For example, there are regulatory issues, programmatic changes or improvements that are needed, etc. These non-renewal projects may have a lower numerical priority as the basis for the decision is not related to the condition. Your numerical priority comes into play when you are making pure condition-based decisions. Defining the criteria for why you picked a specific project is critical to communicating the logic you used to select a specific project or projects (we call this a Road Map).
The third and final key functionality that we see in terms of CAMS software is the ability to streamline the on-going data management process, which is tightly linked to capital planning (since capital projects are what create the need to update data). Most organizations that we work with struggle with maintaining their FCA data over time. If not done properly, it can be a labor-intensive task in forensic thinking. In theory, as soon as you replace or repair one element within your portfolio, if you do not update your condition data, your dataset is no longer valid.
Whether you use internal resources, or an out-sourced provider to keep your FCA data fresh over time, you want the software to do two things, reduce the manual effort required to do the work, and maintain the integrity of the data by eliminating the opportunities for human error.
When you complete a capital renewal you need to delete the DCRM need and create a future lifecycle requirement to replace the newly installed element based on its expected useful life. This is fairly straight forward when you are replacing an entire element. However, once you get into renovations of spaces and/or tiered replacements, it gets a lot trickier, if your CAMS is not designed to handle these “partial” replacements. You want a CAMS software that reduces the number of manual steps required to complete partial replacements but automating updates to existing elements (the remainder of the original element) and creating new elements (the newly installed partial element). This process will save time, and also reduce the opportunity for a data entry error by a user as part of a multistep manual process.
These two functionalities work best together when you do your capital planning in the CAMS, manage the projects through their lifecycle and then reconcile the data as projects are completed.
We have come to the end of our series on the evolution of FCAs, and the end of our discussion on software as well. The beauty is that the story has not ended, and I am excited to see what the future holds for FCAs specifically and facility and infrastructure asset management in general over the coming years and decades. Thank for taking this two-month journey with me.
PLEASE ENGAGE US THROUGH COMMENTS
You may have noticed that we recently added a comments feature to our blog. We would love to engage in dialogue with you on any of our current and previous posts. Also, if there are any topics that you would like us to post on in the future, please leave a comment.