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What Is Corporate Asset Management?
Asset management is an integrated approach, involving all organization departments, to effectively manage existing and new assets to deliver services to customers. The intent is to maximize benefits, reduce risks and provide satisfactory levels of service to the community in a sustainable manner – providing an optimum balance. Good asset management practices are fundamental to achieving sustainable communities
From a practical perspective, asset management is based on a set of fundamentals:
- Value: Assets exist to provide value to the organization and its stakeholders.
- Leadership: Leadership and workplace culture support achieving plans and goals.
- Alignment: Asset management translates the organizational objectives into technical and financial decisions, plans, and activities.
- Assurance: Asset management gives assurance that assets will fulfill their required purpose.
What Is an Asset?
All physical infrastructure that is necessary to support the social, economic and environmental services provided by the organization.
What Is the Corporate Asset Management Policy?
The Corporate Asset Management Policy is a Council policy that sets out the City’s approach to planning, designing, constructing, acquiring, operating, maintaining, renewing, replacing and disposing of its municipal infrastructure assets in a way that ensures sound stewardship of public resources, while delivering effective and efficient customer service. It provides a coordinated approach to align asset management planning with the City’s financial plans, budget and other relevant Acts, policies, frameworks, and plans. It also outlines the City’s commitment to considering climate change, mitigation approaches, disaster planning and supports informed decision-making and planning with respect to the City’s contingency funding. The CAM Policy provides a foundation for the City’s CAM Program which assists in identifying and prioritizing investments in existing and future municipal infrastructure assets to ensure it is robust, safe, sustainable, efficient, and capable of supporting the desired quality of life in our community. The Policy also identifies the roles and responsibilities of staff who make infrastructure-related decisions to provide a clear governance structure to ensure that other elements of the CAM Program (CAM Strategy, CAM Plan, CAM Processes) align with the CAM Policy and the City’s Strategic Plan.
What Is the CAM Plan?
The CAM Plan sets out how the City’s infrastructure will be managed to achieve the commitments and principles outlined in the CAM Policy which is achieved through the following:
- Understanding the current state of local infrastructure systems.
- Measuring and monitoring levels of service (LOS) metrics established by staff to enable a quantitative connection between aspects of infrastructure systems and the degree to which the systems are achieving the objectives laid out in the CAM Policy.
- Developing a relationship between the asset lifecycle management strategies executed by staff (i.e. operation, maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement of assets) and the LOS metrics.
- Establishing a financial strategy to fund expenditures that are required to achieve the approved LOS metrics.
What Is the Infrastructure Gap?
It is the difference between the planned budget and reserve fund availability versus the optimal expenditure to manage assets needs (what is available versus what is required)
What Are Levels of Service?
Levels of service (LOS) are the objectives that the City intends to deliver to its customers. LOS are established by City service areas and include key performance indicators as well as some mandatory metrics recommended by the Ontario Regulation 588/17. LOS describe the outcomes customers experience through the delivery of services the City of Guelph provides. Every day people use City assets to travel safely, get clean drinking water and many other services. Typically, residents are more focused on the services they receive, but behind the scenes the City is making investments, delivering operations and maintenance and weighing tradeoffs between cost and risk that ensure the customer service is received.