Enabling Long-term Decisions: Asset Lifecycle Management

Asset life cycle management is taking the expected time that an asset should exist in the system and then using data such as how many times has this been worked on, how many parts have we replaced on that, and getting kind of an estimate if we need to go with that industry standard or maybe we can keep this thing running twice its life expectancy. It's easy to get caught in the weeds and doing day to day stuff, putting out fires, but you have to see what what are you doing? What are you accomplishing? We use data to back it up, to confirm it, and we wanna see what's going on at every plant, every asset. When do you replace equipment? Do you do it just because the the book says, you know, replace the chiller after twenty three years? But you've got to have the right information on that equipment to be able to determine whether or not you can get thirty five years or if you just replace it when most people replace it. If you're not looking at all of the equipment and asset management of all the equipment, then you can't make smart decisions. And so they need good data to be able to make smart decisions. And to be able to make those smart decisions, you need to have good information about all of your equipment. You've gotta prioritize. A lot of it is how critical is the equipment and what's the condition of the equipment. If you've got all that information, you can make smart decisions on how to budget over the next five years for equipment replacement, for example. Assets are everything. So if we take something really simple like an HVAC chiller unit, you know, it's a significant investment. It then controls whether you can use the room, so that can be really, really critical as it ages out over time. So understanding through to its eventual replacement, this full and total life cycle, if we just worry about one piece of it, we can't really help clients make the best decision for the long term because perhaps we wouldn't be thinking about, okay, but when it's replaced, what's it gonna be replaced by? What's the impact on energy costs of not doing that versus physical maintenance costs of keeping it running? We can help identify the primary areas of where you can put your resources to get the best value out of that when you have limited resources and shrinking budgets. We're able to help close the gap between those folks who are actually touching the equipment every day and, let's say, a chief financial officer who may be in charge of creating that budget and creating that capital plan. And so what the data does is offer insight to the facilities director and then help create a plan that is translatable to the CFO.