Life Cycle Asset Management – Maintaining and Renewing Infrastructure

This post is the continuation of Ross and Grant’s discussions in the previous post, “Know the Basic Infrastructure Asset Management Process.”

Grant continues:

So that’s why you might have two processes running at the same time there Ross.

Where you’ve really got the existing assets that you’re maintaining throughout their life cycle, whatever point of the life cycle that may be.

And then if you got demand issues at the same time, you’re looking at the new assets you need and trying to integrate that with the life cycle of the existing ones.

So you may have some assets that are actually if we talk about water for a moment, that is getting towards the end of their life.

But if you got a capacity issue then ideally you’d be wanting to upgrade at a time where you’re getting the most value out of your expenditure.

Ross:

Yes, and that sort of after you’ve got past operating and maintaining it’s into that renewal phase.

And often renewal, you’d go back a few years when we first start this process, we would typically renew like with like I think would be the default. If it’s a water main and you had a 6-inch pipe, you put a 6-inch pipe back again.

Grant:

Pretty frustrating if you do that and you haven’t got a good understanding of demand at the same time so you could replace the 6-inch or that 150-mm pipe with the same thing you’re expecting that will be fine.

But if you got a new industry being built that’s got a large water demand, you could have an opportunity there for a small increase in cost and a larger pipe may actually help the economy of your area by upgrading that pipe at the same time.

Ross:

That whole question of asset replacement is an interesting one, there’s a lot of work on that area when you’re starting again with your asset management planning.

Here in New Zealand, we had a whole lot of deferred renewals of assets that are basically wearing out.

And a lot of cost coming up that nobody knew about that – we kind of had to unpack that and get a good understanding of what future expenditure requirements were going to be.  

In addition, you do need to understand your risks well and you do need to understand whether you need more or less capacity when you’re renewing.

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