How To Optimise Your Asset Portfolio

Why optimise your asset portfolio?

You want a clear picture of your reactive expenses and make sure it’s money well spent. But before you can get to that, you and your team must face the difficulties of disparate data sets and inefficient paper-based documentation. Does this sound familiar?

A recent publication by Government News found that key issues within asset management lie within the ability to manage budgetary expenditure. The article stresses the importance of strong governance and control across ‘the operating model and supporting processes’ to maximise efficiency and safety.

You need longer-term clarity on capital expenditure to avoid surprise expenses. However, you may only have a short-term estimate from modelling and predicting the lifecycle of your assets.

As the famous quote says, ‘failing to plan is planning to fail’. Understanding the current state of your assets, setting up a clear plan and ensuring you have the right systems and tools allows you to have an executable methodology to manage your assets to your objectives.

Optimising your asset portfolio

You can resolve these issues and restrictive practices and start to detail how you can examine, understand and optimise your assets. You can start today – right now.

You do not need to be a large enterprise. You don’t need implemented digital practices or an extensive understanding of the process to start proactively managing and optimising your assets. Understanding your baseline and executing the plan isn’t onerous. It is a tailored process completed in steps to suit your needs.

We need to turn our focus to systematically approaching our unique assets and establishing a plan – measured against business and operational objectives.

1. Get to know your assets

First, you must understand your current portfolio of assets. Ask yourself:

• Do you have up to date records of quantities, locations and the current conditions of your assets?
• Do you have the required visibility of and control over asset performance and expenditure in line with your KPIs?
• Have you faced any unexpected CAPEX and/or OPEX spend due to a sudden failure of assets?
  
  

A safe pair of hands like Hendry can be a useful ally in evaluating and understanding the current state of your assets and providing analysis into capital expenditure.

2. Understand your goals and the needs of your occupants

Understanding your goals and the needs of your occupants should run in tandem with traditional lifecycle planning methods, particularly CAPEX (capital expenditure) modelling. Additionally, this step should extend to a review of the maintenance scope of subcontractors. This review will ensure that all works performed on-site work towards your core objectives.

Roles need to be supported by systems and tools that govern maintenance frameworks and contribute to the regular reviews of performance. Performance reviews may come through asset management team meetings and records generated by computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS).

In essence, your priorities define your objectives, compare targets against current figures and establish achievable growth targets within a defined time frame. When this is accomplished, you can you scale your model according to your current position and account for key stages in future growth.

3. Examine your infrastructure – is everything as it should be?

Take a closer look at the current systems and infrastructure underpinning your assets. Have they been correctly implemented to a high working standard? Additionally, have they been maintained in keeping with the prescribed maintenance schedule or governing regulations?

You need to review the implementation of on-site building management systems and systems tuning to understand the impact on energy and resource consumption.

Knowing how these utilities support your assets’ functions will highlight where inefficiencies and wastage occur. As a result, it will help you establish your asset optimisation strategy and implementation plan.

4. Embrace new technologies to maximise asset optimisation

We must now examine how our building or portfolio performs down to the smallest detail. 

Tools such as 360-degree imagery and 3D scanning can generate a vast level of detail across a given environment and work to serve several purposes. These tools provide key stakeholders with a shared view, where contractors and facility managers can input their data into the same environment.

Analytics and cloud-based visualisations allow you to aggregate data from multiple systems across multiple buildings and portfolios to allow clear insights and performance tracking. You can find out how everything is operating at a push of a button. In most cases, the data already exists. It just needs the right approach to analyse and configure the tools to get meaningful and useful outcomes.

Investing in technology such as these can be staged to minimise financial impact. Furthermore, the benefits of visibility, insights and peace of mind are hard to ignore.

Back yourself with a safe pair of hands

These ideals are sound in principle, but in terms of action, you need the backing and direction of an organisation with proven experience in asset audit and advisory.

Hendry’s asset audit and advisory services help you utilise record asset data and registers. Additionally, we’ll help you understand and interpret their meaning and potential. We break down complex scopes of assets and infrastructure, then map compliant and cost-effective solutions for you. Defining your assets, identifying which assets are critical and how to maintain them is key for every business.