Aviation Insight Header Test
THINK

2024

Maximizing infrastructure investments through holistic asset management

How agencies can enhance asset condition, performance and service life while minimizing costs

By Chad Allen, PE | Transportation Asset Management Consultant, HNTB

As agencies invest in maintaining and modernizing their transportation systems, maximizing the value of their assets and extending the service life of their infrastructure is paramount.

Holistic asset management, a collaborative, proactive, data-driven, risk-based and performance-based approach, can play a vital role in achieving agency goals by guiding, supporting and implementing maintenance activities and capital improvement projects at strategic points in an asset’s life cycle.

Historically, asset management has balanced asset performance and maturity to drive decision-making. Holistic asset management builds on this approach by considering the entire lifecycle of the assets, from planning and design through construction, operations and maintenance. This approach emphasizes collaboration across different disciplines and departments, ensuring that all aspects of an asset’s lifecycle are considered in an agency’s decision-making processes.

Holistic asset management enhances asset condition, performance and community satisfaction, while minimizing the costs associated with managing the asset over its lifespan. Additionally, holistic asset management emphasizes long-term planning, ensuring that future infrastructure investments support safety and mobility goals while delivering infrastructure improvements that are equitable, financially sustainable and resilient.

Collaboration across disciplines

Achieving holistic asset management requires a collaborative approach. When agencies unite experts from the planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance disciplines to consider the comprehensive costs and benefits of new, existing or proposed assets, the results can optimize safety and mobility while reducing maintenance and operating costs.

For example, soliciting input from diverse perspectives on a proposed bridge upgrade can lead to a safer, more sustainable and cost-effective structure. The project contractors might suggest materials or methods that can reduce future maintenance or enhance worker safety, while planners could advocate for bidirectional bike or pedestrian lanes to improve accessibility and equity. Meanwhile, the operations team might propose reversible lanes to manage peak travel times. These combined insights maximize the asset’s value and ensure its longevity.

Asset management should be considered from a life cycle perspective but also from a geospatial and temporal perspective. The impacts of our transportation investments must be understood so that critical assets are delivered to our communities in ways that increase equity, safety, mobility and livability. When implemented effectively and efficiently, the benefits and cost savings of asset management can compound, providing agencies with additional financial flexibility to address their asset backlog (those assets in poor condition), fund long-deferred capital projects or embrace emerging technologies. This comprehensive approach ensures that infrastructure investments are not only efficient and effective but also sustainable and resilient in the long term.

Steps to success

To realize the maximum benefits of asset management, an agency must approach implementation from a holistic perspective. This requires each strategy and action to be coordinated programmatically and transparently as a cohesive system rather than a set of isolated tasks within different organizational silos. There are five key steps on the path to holistic asset management.

Step 1: Strategic planning and alignment

This step forms the foundation for any asset management plan. It begins by understanding how asset management supports the future direction and desired community-based outcomes. It is important to establish and communicate a clear vision and strategy while identifying critical asset management-based performance objectives, securing leadership’s support and appointing an internal champion. From there, deliverables include a transportation asset management plan that aligns with the agency’s long-range and strategic transportation plans, asset management-based policies that establish data governance, performance measures, desired service levels and preferred asset investment strategies.

Step 2: Inventory & Condition Assessment

Holistic asset management requires timely, accurate data to drive decisions. During this step, owners conduct a thorough, detailed inventory of all infrastructure assets, their physical attributes and their conditions. When the enterprise-wide asset management inventory is complete, agencies have a clear understanding of what assets they own, where they are located and what condition they are in. A commitment to understanding how asset condition changes over time provides the data necessary to develop deterioration curves which enhance the predictability and accuracy of future investment strategies.

Step 3: Managing Risks, Increasing Performance

With a firm command of the system’s components and their places on the state-of-good-repair spectrum, the agency can compare an asset’s condition to the desired performance level, assess the vulnerability of the asset to various risks and determine the overall criticality or importance of that asset’s function to the overall system. Insights gathered during this evaluation help the agency identify and begin to prioritize the assets in need of repair, rehabilitation or replacement. Steps taken toward identifying and quantifying risks, developing mitigation strategies and prioritizing performance are useful in generating an asset management implementation road map.

Step 4: Life cycle strategy development

Using the data collected, agencies estimate the costs to mitigate significant risks and attain desired performance metrics and asset condition levels. By comparing future investment levels to current and projected budgets, owners can prioritize projects and more accurately budget for future operations, maintenance and capital improvement programs. Life cycle planning supports the ability of capital improvement programs to deliver projects in sync with operations and maintenance plans and can help identify potential savings. For example, understanding system-wide asset needs can lead to the efficient staging of treatments and projects such as timing a culvert replacement at the same time as a paving project. Efficient timing and bundling of asset-based treatments can maximize safety and mobility while minimizing costs related to redundant activities such as mobilization and traffic management while preventing pavement from being excavated to replace a poor condition culvert a year after construction.

Step 5: Optimizing data-driven, decision-making processes

Agencies with a more mature, enterprise-wide asset management approach can populate asset performance and life-cycle management models, run various investment scenarios, consider trade-offs between investments amongst different asset classes and explore alternatives that help to optimize their system-wide asset management strategies. An agency-wide commitment to practicing data-driven asset management over time can reduce risks and optimize asset performance while generating significant cost savings that can be used to reinvest and strengthen an agency’s asset portfolio.

Navigating the adoption process

The journey to fully implement holistic asset management may vary depending on agency resources and methods. However, several key factors are important for all agencies to consider on their asset management journey.

Strategic alignment

Ensuring that holistic asset management aligns with the agency’s strategic and long-term transportation plans is critical. Through organization-wide communication and education, agencies can ensure that all stakeholders understand the benefits of asset management. Setting asset-based performance goals helps to define the agency’s direction.

Data sophistication

Because asset management processes are rooted in data, the adoption process begins by establishing a data governance policy and program. Developing a sophisticated system for collecting, storing and analyzing data on existing assets will support agencies as they move along their individualized path to adoption.

Implementation road map

Understanding the risks and challenges keeping an agency from implementing asset management effectively increases organizational awareness as to what process enhancements, digital solutions and technological innovations are necessary to support asset management growth and maturity at different developmental stages.

Top-down support

When leadership champions holistic asset management, they can provide strategic guidance to the organization and ensure that the program receives the resources it needs. Top-down support for holistic asset management can ease the path to adoption by streamlining organizational engagement.

Delivering more, saving more

In an industry where safety and performance are paramount, holistic asset management’s collaborative, life-cycle, data-driven approach ensures that every asset, present and future, delivers for the community at its highest possible level. This approach not only enhances safety, mobility and service life for a broader universe of users but also delivers substantial cost savings to agencies. By integrating strategic planning, data-driven, decision-making and cross-disciplinary collaboration, holistic asset management provides a robust framework for optimizing infrastructure investments in an equitable manner. As agencies embrace this comprehensive approach, they can achieve greater efficiency, sustainability and resilience in their infrastructure systems, ultimately leading to improved outcomes for all travelers and our communities.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chad Allen, PE
Transportation Asset Management Consultant
HNTB Corporation

Chad Allen is a transportation asset management consultant at HNTB Corporation. He leverages his extensive public-sector expertise to help clients make performance-based, risk-based and data-driven decisions while delivering positive and equitable outcomes for surrounding communities.

Allen recently managed the Asset and Performance Management Program at the Seattle Department of Transportation. Before that, he was director of the Asset Management Bureau at the Vermont Agency of Transportation, where he led the development and implementation of platforms and approaches to meet federal MAP-21 requirements.

Connect on LinkedIn