Sustainable Life Cycle Management and Investment: What Can This Approach Do for Your Organization?

Sustainable Life Cycle Management and Investment: What Can This Approach Do for Your Organization?

02/23/2021

In: Blog Featured Home Portfolio Management

Life Cycle Sustainability Commercial Building Envelope

Facility managers know all too well that managing building assets isn’t as simple as scheduling repairs when they’re needed. Effective and successful management of building assets involves careful planning and triaging, budgeting, forecasting and keeping up with regular repairs and maintenance in order to address both short and long term needs. But you don’t have to do all that in a silo. At Technical Assurance, we partner with organizations to help manage building envelope assets, ultimately leading to a sustainable life cycle of the assets and improving building performance.

What Comprises the Building Envelope?

First thing’s first. Before we get into life cycle management and investment, we first need to address what we’re actually talking about managing and investing in—the building envelope. The exterior walls, fenestrations (windows, doors and skylights), roof and foundation all comprise the building envelope and form a thermal, protective barrier between the interior and exterior, or conditioned and unconditioned, environments of a building. These assets are crucial to a building’s function, are very expensive and are often the systems most overlooked.

Investing in Building Assets vs. Spending on Building Assets

When it comes to managing and maintaining the building envelope, many organizations will take the approach of making repairs and scheduling maintenance when it is obviously needed. This is what we call run-to-failure spending on building systems. You’ve likely heard it from an HVAC technician or even from your doctor, but regular check-ins and maintenance greatly helps with longevity and performance. That goes for nearly anything!

Our approach at Technical Assurance is different than most. We work with clients to pivot to how we can be investing in buildings instead of purely spending on them only when there’s an immediate need. We offer our clients a sustainable investment plan that proactively manages building envelope assets.

Take a Different Approach to Building Envelope Asset Management with Technical Assurance

The Technical Assurance approach to building envelope asset management is different. We develop a sustainable investment plan with clients that proactively manages the life cycle of building envelope assets. This approach positively impacts the financial health of an organization by reducing the overall spend on facility assets through extending life cycles and reducing deferred maintenance and capital backlogs.

Our Process:

  • Discover – Building envelope assessment and inventory
  • Plan – Budget and capital planning
  • Solve – Design solutions and bid management
  • Manage – Construction phase services, including project administration, management and quality observation
  • Sustain – Program sustainability

Our sustainable life cycle investment starts with the initial inventory and assessment of your assets, planning for repair and replacement projects, managing regular preventative maintenance schedules and reporting on cost savings and asset performance. We aim to be your full-service delivery partner in reaching financial health and optimized facility performance.

Part of our process involves triage in which we help you identify and rank projects that should be funded before others. This method uses scientific, engineered factors of the asset’s condition and mission dependency indices, and system criticality when incorporating multiple building systems. Certain repairs done now can help extend the life of your asset before a small problem becomes a larger, more costly one. Triage essentially helps you do more with less by spending your budget and prioritizing in a very programmatic and thoughtful manner.

A 10-year sustainable life cycle management program will:

  • Reduce your overall spend by 10–12%
  • Reduce your total cost of ownership by 25%
  • Reduce your deferred backlog by 30%

Do these objectives align with your goals for 2021? If so, we’d be happy to set up a free consultation to learn more about your facilities and explore how we can help you better invest in their assets.