If your organization has five million or more square feet of real estate holdings, simply maintaining all those buildings and the equipment therein is a complex task. Unless you keep records on every facility and asset, it’s difficult to know how long something should last, when it needs servicing and when it needs replacing. The same applies to strategic planning: If you can’t compare your current holdings against future needs, you can’t run what-if scenarios and manage growth properly.

These management challenges are why large and complex organizations rely on Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS). As you grow your capital portfolio, using an IWMS will ensure you have the most comprehensive and current data available to make informed decisions.

Every organization’s needs are different, but there are a few capital asset management best practices that work regardless of industry, whether your organization is a public, private, governmental or non-governmental organization. These practices fall into three general categories:

• Gathering and consolidating capital asset data
• Maintaining, repairing and replacing
• Planning, building and renovating

By giving you access to a comprehensive and accurate supply of information at your fingertips, a robust IWMS can help you follow the best practices for capital asset management in each of those areas.

Gathering and Consolidating Capital Asset Data

The first step toward optimal capital asset management is making sure all the data concerning those assets are contained in a single accessible database. Taking siloed information from multiple sources can be a giant task in and of itself. This is where an IWMS like IBM TRIRIGAⓇ  proves invaluable, particularly when used in combination with applications such as eCIFM’s DataMigrator and DataConsolidator. eCIFM, a premier IBM business partner and certified value-added TRIRIGA reseller, created the web-based application DataMigrator to simplify and automate the process of transferring data into TRIRIGA, while DataConsolidator reduces waste and inefficiency by consolidating data from TRIRIGA and related systems into valuable reports and documents.

Maintaining, Replacing and Repairing

Once you have a single view of all your data, you can conduct asset lifecycle cost analyses to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) of all facilities and equipment. This will enable you to manage maintenance more efficiently and make accurate repair-versus-replace decisions.

You can also use the single portfolio view for what-ifs by comparing multiple repair versus run-to-fail versus replace scenarios. By giving you the ability to manage your building equipment and assets over time, IBM TRIRIGA’s Workplace Operations Manager module will help you maintain those assets with maximum efficiency—and uncover cost-reduction opportunities.

Planning, Building and Renovating

Depending on your growth projections and strategic planning, at some point you’ll need to renovate some of your capital assets—or build new ones. With the single source of data provided by your IWMS, you’ll be better able to effectively manage those capital projects. The Capital Projects Manager module of TRIRIGA helps with every element at every stage of the process, from organizing all design documents and permits to managing contractor and vendor agreements and prioritizing and assigning jobs. The full real-time view of your capital projects will enable you to bring projects in on-time and within budget.

Get More from Your Data

Capital asset management never ends, but putting these best practices to work on your facilities and equipment portfolio means you’ll have ongoing opportunities for cost reduction and increased efficiency. The capital asset information you collect may be used for more than maintaining operations:

• TRIRIGA’s Energy Manager module can help you analyze your energy use and CO2 emissions to meet your sustainability-related goals.  
• eCIFM’s industry-specific solutions are designed to help you use TRIRIGA to plan and manage challenges specific to your field.
• Mobile apps like Inspections On-The-Go free TRIRIGA from the desktop, keeping processes moving when you’re out of the office and putting equipment and facility information in the hands of your people in the field.

Where to Start

The eCIFM team includes some of the world’s leading TRIRIGA experts, including TRIRIGA users from a variety of industries. We tailor IWMS to your current business workflow, so there’s no need for you to change the way you do business. We’d like to hear from you. Tell us how you’re managing capital assets now and how you envision your organization’s future growth. We’ll listen and help you get there.