In Focus: Exploring Asset Management Challenges

Society News

SAME’s Facility Asset Management COI serves to enhance the efficient, effective, and sustainable stewardship of federal facilities, providing a collaborative platform for sharing resources, technologies, and strategies that support informed decision-making and risk management.

Connecting Concerns

This past May, in Orlando, Fla., the FAM Forum explored two challenges of military asset management through group discussions among influential industry and government leaders.

Topic One: Renovating BUILDER. BUILDER SMS needs to evolve to meet the expanding needs of installations in facility energy, resilience, and climate change. To optimize building lifecycle costs amid underfunded sustainment budgets, new features should be prioritized to provide comprehensive facility insights and solutions tailored to these evolving demands.

Guidance received during the in-brief explored a broad view of asset management data needs. Beyond its initial condition index feature, the Defense Department now requires enhancements to SMS to support electrification, energy reduction, weather resilience, and carbon footprint reduction.

The group sessions focused on BUILDER SMS needs at the installation level, followed by a discussion of enterprise issues. The installation-level session explored needed features for local initiatives, while the enterprise-level session addressed needs for data analysis to inform proposed policy and metrics tracking.

The FAM Forum identified significant challenges stemming from the lack of standardization of equipment, which has led to increased costs and inefficiencies.

The participants also found a need to move beyond traditional condition index by incorporating enhanced data visualization, standardization, automation, and interacting with outside datasets. An enhanced SMS suite of tools would enable better articulation of risk from unfunded projects.

Topic Two: Instituting Higher Learning into DOD. The ongoing struggle to fund defense asset sustainment underscores the need for innovative management and decision analysis. Already, private/public/education institutions employ asset management systems for strategic investments and cost management. By examining these and comparing them to military challenges, opportunities for improvement can emerge.

To inform the dialogue, the Facility Asset Management COI had previously conducted a Higher Learning Survey to benchmark asset management practices across various organizations. The results, along with linkages to the ISO 55k standard and the National Academies report “Strategies to Renew Federal Facilities” formed the basis of the discussion.

The sessions focused on comparing different institutions in operating contexts including asset management systems, financial management, lifecycle planning, cost estimates, focusing funding, and risk management. They addressed facets of strategic planning, resource decision-making, and budgeting beyond one-year funding. And they delved into barriers to increasing agility of rightsizing facilities and implementing space management.

Moving Facilities Forward

The FAM Forum identified significant challenges stemming from the lack of standardization of equipment, which has led to increased costs and inefficiencies. For example, inadequate sustainment cost models and area cost factors have resulted in underfunding; however, the bigger challenge is the initial underfunding of the SRM portfolio. A second focus of the discussion addressed the challenge of scarcity of skilled labor. While recommendations emerged for automating viable functions, the department faces obstacles in adopting new technologies swiftly, so to overcome these hurdles, the forum recommended establishing an organizational entity similar to a weapons systems Program Execution Office or a Program Management Office.

The conversations taking place throughout the week led the COI to develop working groups to further address both topics. As SAME moves forward into 2025 and beyond, new opportunities will emerge for facility management professionals to collaborate on key issues affecting the operation of federal assets, working across the aisle to influence adoption of improved standards and best practices.

Those looking to engage on these topics should reach out to the Facility Asset Management COI for more information.

Carole Mahady, LMI, is Communications Lead, Facility Management COI; cmahady@lmi.org (www.same.org/facility-asset-management-community).

Article published in The Military Engineer, November-December 2024

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In Focus digs deep into singular programs and events from across the Society, shining a light on how SAME is making an impact on developing multidisciplined solutions to national security infrastructure challenges.