Well I get really excited about life-cycle planning because it's not just the construction of the project that you need to be worried about.
It's following an asset to the end of its useful life, including all the maintenance in between.
And when you're using tools like life-cycle investment models, you're able to project how much money you need at a certain point in time to replace that aging infrastructure.
It also gives you the ability to analyze any trade-offs between service cost and risk.
So life-cycle planning for us, involves using three different resources to compile a list of all First Nation assets.
So we use the Acres Report submitted to INAC, or amortization schedule from the auditors, as well as our insurance listing.
From these three documents we compile a list of all the assets, and then we can better plan for their repair, maintenance, upgrades, or ultimate replacement.
Being able to show the community the amount of reserve funding that you need to be prepared, in order to keep your assets at a level that's going to meet the service needs for the community. It's important to plan ahead for the replacement of our assets because nothing lasts forever.
We have to be able to determine the lifespan of an asset and we have to be able to replace it.
And so it's very important to budget for that replacement reserves start at bank accounts, so we have initial investment already for the next cycle of our assets.
If you don't do life-cycle planning, you open yourself up to multiple risks, such as health and safety risks, liability risks, financial risks.
They could ultimately end up affecting operations of the band.
Life cycle planning also helps you manage your funds better.
As you know that this year we have to replace five fridges, so knowing that you can make bargains with companies for better deals.
One of the most important assets that we found hard to plan for is the replacement of our file servers.
I remember thinking if I could only wait until April to get that new file server, and much like everything else, if you plan for something bad to happen, quite often it does.
We lost our file server two weeks before the end of the fiscal year, the amount of effort to replace the file server and planning that has to go into redoing all of your document management is something that is worth planning for.