Getting Started with Lifecycle Analysis

Hi. Welcome to Transforming AM, our regular video series where we're discussing key asset management topics and sharing tips drawn from our collective experience in the industry. My name is Lauren Russell. I'm joined today by Rory Gibbons, and he'll be discussing the critical role life cycle analysis plays in the asset management process. Welcome, Rory. Hi, Lauren. Yeah. Life cycle analysis certainly is critical to any asset asset intensive organisation. For many organisations, service is provided through physical assets and a reliable lifecycle model ensures that that service can be continually provided in a sustainable manner by ensuring that finance has been planned for each phase of the asset's life cycle. Lifecycle analysis also puts us into a whole of life cost mindset. So we still see many organizations focusing on the initial capital costs, but typically these are only accounting for about twenty percent of the total cost of asset ownership. And lifecycle analysis gives us a means to move away from those traditional siloed approaches of each business unit, setting up its own budgets based on historical averages for their particular area. Great. Great points. Really important for, you know, all asset intensive organizations. So how can they start their journey towards starting their life cycle analysis? Yeah. I've seen successful organizations approach it in three key steps. Firstly, get started and develop a first generation model. So it's tempting as practitioners to wanna have all the perfect data, great lifecycle parameters all validated by the organisational stakeholders, but the reality is it's going to take time to develop these things. And in the meantime, you're going to have a more immediate pressing business need to have a working lifecycle model guiding both the long term financial planning and the shorter term works packaging. Getting started with the information at hand and the knowledge of a small working group will allow you to build out that first generation model, meet those immediate business needs, and it also gives you a real product that you can then take to your stakeholders for further refinement. And that stakeholder engagement step is the next key step. And that might be engaging with works teams, maintenance teams, service managers, those in your organisation who understand your assets the best. And you might workshop through items like the expected life of the asset. You might refine degradation profiles based on the input of maintenance teams. You might set or adjust intervention levels and where those intervention levels are placed within the degradation profile. Whatever is going to add the most value to your project. And the engagement step is also really critical because it brings your stakeholders along on that journey with you, and builds confidence in the life cycle analysis process itself. And lastly, the last key step is focus on presentation to convey effective messaging. So simple graphs and charts can take us a long way. We all know that green is good, red is bad, but you're gonna be dealing with a wide range of stakeholders from leadership to operational teams. And they're gonna have different, information needs. So you need results agile enough to appeal to each of those groups. So successful organizations are typically going down the digital dashboarding path, having results that, you know, include filters, the ability to slice and dice down information any way you want, and meet the stakeholder where they're at. So agile, accessible results, really important to facilitating change. Absolutely. Thanks, Rory. Sounds like a really solid approach. We all know that getting stakeholder buy in, is of course a critical aspect of, you know, the success of any projects, let alone just within asset management. Do you have any last key takeaways for the audience? I would say don't folk don't forget about the disposal costs. So with ever increasing environmental regulations and focus on principles of circular economy, the old days of taking the asset down to the scrapyard, applying two or three percent of its replacement value as a disposal cost, it's probably not gonna cut it anymore. So particularly focusing on those, if you're dealing with assets with hazardous or complex material, that's really important in your life cycle analysis. Great. Thanks, Rory. It's a phenomenal topic. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your thoughts. To everyone watching, we really hope you enjoyed this, episode, and please get the conversation going in the comments. Drop us a like, share, and or follow, and keep an eye out for our next episode coming soon. Thanks, guys.