Business Goal Linkage
This topic covers:
If we understand our long term (20 years) capital and recurrent funding needs to meet customer expectations, we also need to have appropriate pricing and funding strategies that:
- Match the needs of the organization
- Ensure our sustainability and reporting in triple bottom line terms.
A service organization needs to:
- Understand the full and minimum economic cost of service delivery
- Have a policy of charging the full economic cost of “commercial” activities
- Adopt policies for subsidising service delivery where the full economic cost is not charged
- Report on these costs and apply them to the relevant service programs.
Best appropriate practice in asset management means there should be links ranging from an organization’s business goals to its investments and ultimately to action plans:
Future levels of service also need to be understood as a major factor contributing to strategic planning for assets.
Factors impacting on these include:
- Regulatory requirements such as:
- Environmental discharge controls
- Odors and Limits
- Non-regulatory aspects such as:
- Image of Treatment Plants
- Responsiveness to Complaints
- Sustainability / Good Governance.
Life cycle asset management involves a complex set of quality elements to ensure the most appropriate management of assets.
The key quality elements involve:
- Business philosophy and objectives
- Life cycle asset management processes
- Procedures and practices appropriate to the assets
- Life cycle asset management functions
- Management structure.
It is vital for all owners of assets, and more particularly to those owners with large complex portfolios, to be able to paint a clear picture of their business performance in this area.
They need to be able to identify what they can produce and at what cost. Those organizations that can, are the ones that have developed best appropriate practices in all of the above areas.
This approach requires the consideration of the entire life cycle process. From the initial concept or identification of a demand for service through the creation phase, into operations, maintenance and renewal and through to disposal; all elements need to be considered.
This is relatively easy for a single asset, but when organizations own a mature network or portfolio that consists of hundreds of thousands of individual assets, the task becomes complicated. It is therefore important to understand where assets are in their life cycle and what we can do about their cost and their performances.