Work together for Successful Investment Planning

Petra Weisenborn

We are diving into a fascinating topic that arises when local teams and facility management come together: asset investment planning. We all know the importance of maintaining and upgrading our facilities, but what happens when different voices enter the conversation?

This post explores the delicate balance between local input and centralized decision-making in asset investment planning.

Use case

The institution’s facility manager for higher education maintains a list in Excel with all asset investments mentioned by the institution’s different college directors.

He met with the directors individually during the budgeting process and collected their thoughts about the investments needed in the new year to keep the school attractive for its students and staff. His list contained new classroom tables and chairs, cars, touch screens, mobile phones, etc. The list was longer than the budget allowed for, so not all items on the list made it into the approved budget.

When the institution started using an online budget tool, the facility manager continued to use his Excel list. When the final list of investment items was ready at the end of the budgeting process, he instructed the college directors to enter the approved investments in the investment module of the budget tool.

Another approach

We have nothing against the above way of working. However, the work can be organized more efficiently and effectively by using XLReporting for your online budget tool. The template that XLReporting has developed is an investment planner that can handle two types of users.

The users with director rights can freely give their input on what they wish to invest in. Their input automatically gets the status “Application”. The users with facility manager rights can change the status of the application for investment into “Decided,” change the investment amount and comment on their decision.

When the user with college director rights next checks the investment module, he will see the changes the facility manager has made. He is not able to reverse the decision. All depreciation expenses are calculated automatically, becoming part of his college’s total budget. The benefit of the described double-user type approach is that all investments, including those decided against, are kept for reference. The facility manager can inspect the colleges’ investments individually, but he can also see the investments of all colleges on his screen.

We regularly apply this workflow method in our planning templates. If you would like to know more about this, please get in touch with us. We are happy to explain it to you.