I was recently running a mayoral presentation at an amalgamated regional council, helping them through this hectic time of year, and the Mayor asked me:

“Ashay, all this jargon about integrated planning – I get it, but tell me in very simple terms what does it really mean?”

And it dawned on me - our fraternity uses too much jargon and makes a simple thing terribly complex!

Our councillors and mayors aren't always asset engineers, let alone trained accountants. And they don't have to be. They have qualified for their role as stewards of the community via different professions and they have every right to ask for a simple, robust view of the state of play.

So after the tea break I took the audience through a simple story...

We picked a public toilet as an example and within twenty minutes we were able to develop a simple
life-cycle plan:

• $60,000 to acquire
• $4,000 per annum to maintain at a standard that is acceptable for cleaning and consumables
• $6,000 to re-paint every 15 years
• $3,000 to replace fittings every 10 years
• $35,000 to refurbish in year 50

So now we had eight councillors and the Mayor on their smart phones, adding up the figures and the penny dropped - every asset has an ongoing life–cycle cost that is not hard to compute. And yes, you can annualise that cost to determine what the rates and taxes ought to be.

Simple? Yes! The metrics became easy – one public toilet was worth 50% of one property’s rates per year… wow!!

Integrated planning is simple as long as your asset system can cater for criticality-based modelling and scenario analysis, which is why we built Assetic SAM to facilitate exactly that!

Set a service level, articulate a threshold for intervention, and run multiple what-if scenarios within minutes!

Then, your resultant output gives you options:

• To keep my parks at five-star level costs me $3m per annum
• If I only keep four parks at five-star level, 20 parks at four-star and the remainder at three-star, it now only costs me $1.2m per annum

“Bingo!” says the Mayor, “now I get it.”

Integrated planning is the best thing to have ever been implemented. It brought mayors and councillors to the party, thinking about strategies for asset management. It provides options in a very simple and effective manner that allow them as stewards to make better decisions.

Every time a councillor says “I think we should do this at budget time, every year” or “I have aspirational projects but I want the assets team to tell me what the impacts of those are on the rest of the world” – that to me is totally satisfying.

That to me is integrated planning truly integrated.