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3 Smart Ways to Make Facility Capital Planning Stress Free

Do you want to improve your facility capital planning process, eliminate the headaches from staring at excel, and make your job easier? Smart capital planners and facility managers use software to drastically improve the effectiveness of their operations and planning. In this guide, we’ll share 3 stress-free facility capital planning ideas that the pros use to successfully complete critical projects and even finalize value-added projects. Meaning that their facilities run smoothly and look great.

1. Make Facility Capital Projects the Priority

After you have filed data from condition assessments of your property, you need to determine what must be done in the coming year as well as the timeline for each of those items. Deferred maintenance is the enemy of any facility manager. If you accumulate too much, you are at risk of equipment failure and will spend substantially more money on reactive maintenance.

Learn how FOUNDATION can generate cost and timelines for capital projects >

Often capital projects include major operations and maintenance projects. Examples include system renewal projects, strategic capital projects and mandated projects. A system renewal project may include replacing the infrastructure of your plumbing or electrical system, making it safer and more efficient. Strategic capital projects include constructing a new building. Mandated projects involve complying with local, state, and federal regulations.

You can improve transparency and accuracy for your capital planning needs by prioritizes and monitoring progress while addressing those dreaded deficiencies when you make facility capital planning projects the priority. This will enable you to maintain a healthy built environment for all facilities in your portfolio and preserve the useful-life of critical assets for the future.

2. Look to the Past to Prepare for the Future

It is critical to track and review past activities using your facility maintenance software. Past maintenance activities are a great benchmark to review for successful facility capital planning. Looking at the projects you completed, gives you an idea of what to anticipate in the future based on past performance.

Specifically, it is important to consider the kind of work your team has performed in the past. Were you reacting to emergencies and critical safety concerns or did you primarily focus on preventative maintenance? Also take note of spending. How much did you spend last year and how much do you intend to spend this year?

From a capital planning perspective, if you don't track when and how maintenance is performed on equipment and log those details, you are at a disadvantage. Without this information, your team is at risk of spending more on maintaining an asset than it would cost to replace it. Quality facility maintenance software will track this data and can be easily exported into your already existing budgeting tools.

3. Analyze your Metrics

True. Reviewing your past budget will offer you an idea of where your future number will fall, however, you should not totally depend on this strategy to plan your budget. Spend some time figuring basic statistics based on past years. Calculate a range for your anticipated budget that takes into account the worst case scenario. This will help to mitigate risk when planning new projects.

Plan for early replacements and premature asset failures. Take this range further by figuring a confidence interval. This number provides a range of likely capital needs. Take a 95 percent confidence interval as an example. You may conclude that you are 95 percent confident that your operating budget will fall between 1.2 million and 1.5 million dollars. This means there is a 5 percent chance that your budget is below or exceeds this range. Your capital planning software will help you calculate this number.

When predicting a budget, you want to strive for the number that allows your team to complete all projects with some money left over for proactive and preventative projects, but you must also know your lowest acceptable budget. Consider what the minimum amount is that your team will need to not only survive but thrive.

These 3 tips will ensure that your facilities management team is geared up for success by helping you to improve your facility capital planning. Ready to learn more about stress-free facility management and capital planning?

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