BENEFITS OF A CAM SYSTEM LIKE FAME

Although capital funding for infrastructure (total combined physical assets) represents a large portion of any institution’s total annual capital outlay, and these assets are directly linked to the institution’s core mission, proper stewardship of physical assets remains a challenge.

The researchers at the Institute for Research in Construction at the National Research Council of Canada indicate there are six “What’s” that corporations need to answer to successfully manage their infrastructure:

1. What do you own?
   Identify where assets are located and what quantities exist. This can be done by creating reports of your own infrastructure asset types such as quantities of boilers, types of roofing etc.
2. What is the maintenance backlog?
   The maintenance backlog is determined by having an understanding of what needs to be repaired, replaced and/or upgraded in the current fiscal cycle to alleviate your future capital funding requirements.
3. What is the remaining service life?
   A trend analysis of utilization and capacity performance that is provided by corporations business areas can be used as a benchmark for remaining  service life and can assist in the provision of information or decision-making by asset managers.
4. What is its condition?
   Condition assessment data in the form of test results, inspections and past condition measurement indicators can be integrated with your individual infrastructure assets to effectively assess the condition of your overall infrastructure.
5. What is its worth?
   Responding to this requires the ability to link financial data with your infrastructure inventory to calculate capital replacement costs.  Reports on infrastructure asset types can be rolled up to total values sorted by buildings, zones, regions etc.
6. What will you fix first?
   Prioritization of rehabilitation and upgrades through optimization modeling is of significant value in assessing the order of what is to be repaired, replaced, and/or upgraded first.  This will assist greatly in providing more accurate and readily available information for short and long term capital planning.

Essentially, a sound capital asset management system will provide data that will enable any institution to answer the following questions:

• What comprises the corporation’s total portfolio of assets?
• What are the existing physical and functional conditions?
• What changes are required to support the organizational mission?
• What investments are required?

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