Overview

Since a large slice of an organization’s expenditure relates to the assets required to deliver the services provided, it is necessary to manage this expenditure better through Best Appropriate Practice (BAP) in asset management. This will ensure that customers and stakeholders are getting assets at a standard that they want, at the lowest cost.

The Asset Strategic Plan is the means by which an agency aligns its asset portfolio with its service delivery requirements.

It documents what assets are needed and how those assets support the agency’s Service Delivery Strategy. It allows the agency to plan and control recurrent expenditure by adopting a whole of life approach to asset management.

It forms an integral part of the agency’s strategic and operational planning process and links with the strategic plans for the agency’s other resource areas such as human resources, information technology and finance.

The strategic planning process involves assessing the bottom-up flow of data against the demands and external influences (global economics etc) to develop a strategic plan. The process identifies the most viable strategy and puts the outlined project through to CIP evaluation and asset creation or acquisition.

To achieve this, the plan should clearly document:

• The processes used to predict the way in which individual assets or their components will fail to meet the key quality elements of service delivery
• The risks associated with asset acquisition and management and the risk of failure of assets to support service delivery
• Optimized renewal decision, giving an overview of the deployment, condition, capacity, failures and performance of the existing assets
• The Life Cycle funding strategy for at least five years, showing proposed investment and sources of funding and the likely impacts on the operating budget, and an analysis of the gap between existing assets and required assets
• The improvement and efficiency programs and asset strategies used to bring the existing asset portfolio into alignment with service delivery needs. This will include the need for new assets, renewals, refurbishment, operations and maintenance and disposals
• The development of asset management plans to bring all the processes together to form the strategic direction for the organization
• The method by which the organization presents their long term strategic planning information to their customer and stakeholder groups and how the feedback from customers is included in their long term strategic planning
• The way in which the organization is able to link its business goals with actual asset action plans, in terms of maintenance or CIP investment
• The process by which an organization can rationalize their ideal total asset management plan to suit the available resources, business drivers or budget constraints. It looks at the way in which this process ensures that the organization gets the best benefit for the dollar that it is spending.