Asset Management Plan – Managing Service Levels of Specialty Assets

One of the things that are a bit interesting in terms of service levels, things like that, that we tend to forget about is we have specialty assets.

So this one is the Boston, they build this new bridge. This is iconic for Boston, US.

This one is Te Rewa Rewa footbridge in Taranaki, with Mount Taranaki behind it. And it’s just in a circle way, a walkway that runs along the coast. And I think that was 3 million dollars for a footbridge.

And you go, whoa! Why would you spend 3 million dollars on a footbridge?

Because I want something that’s going to be in every photo of Taranaki; because the council didn’t pay for it all.

They raised money from the oil companies, the power companies, they did public fundraising and because they wanted to create a really iconic asset.

The thing is about these two here if you’re going to maintain – the service levels for them are quite different from general service levels.

So when you’re having general service levels and you go, oh I need to fix that bridge because it’s on the major road. I need to do this. I need to do this.

And then you get this specialty or iconic assets and they have their own little specialist service level demand because they create their own demand.

And so just something to keeping in mind – heritage assets so the same thing at the other end of the scale you have a very old asset. Let’s take a really iconic example, Taj Mahal.

If you’re doing an asset management plan for Taj Mahal, you’re going to go, ah, am I only going to you know, clean it once every 50 years. Probably not. Probably I might be doing a little bit more than that.

Am I only going to prune the gardens once a year? Oh no, there’s like 30,000 people a day go through that site. Maybe I want to, you know do my litter pick up every day or half a day, all those sorts of things.

So it becomes its own little, we don’t have that many iconic heritage stuff in New Zealand because we’re a bit young but we do have the odd one. So heritage and specialist assets almost end up getting to managed as their own case.

When you’re managing a whole network or you’re managing a whole portfolio of assets, keep your eyes out for these sorts of ones because they have quite different management plans from the general stuff and quite different cost structures.

And often a lot of prohibitions, that what you can and can’t do with them as well, particularly the heritage assets.

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