Maintenance Budgeting

[Bryson]

I'm interested in how people who manage facilities set their maintenance budgets.  The way they would teach you at MBA school would be to assign a percentage of the total replacement value of the "asset" you are maintaining.  2-5% is generally considered normal - I'm curious as to whether people actually use this method or do it a different way, and also where those budgets land.

 

I have a number in mind for how I always used to calculate this when I was a Technical Manager, but I'm curious at to what's happening out in the real world. 

 

I suspect there may be a largish number of people who have never sat down and calculated the total replacement value of their gear and may be surprised at how large a number it is.

 

 

[J Pearce]

I've drafted several replies, but all felt a bit too much detail to share publicly. I've answered the poll, and happy to talk on DM if that would be useful.

[mac.calder]

I think it depends on lifecyle replacement policy;

I'm in a university, our AV lifecycle is 5-7 years and we have about a 2-3% annual budget for maintenance. The closer the median age gets to 7 years, the more that we need to push that higher. 

That said, we tend to base our budget figure more on past years experience for 'ad hoc' things, and then do project funding where there are troublesome devices we wish to expunge... ie we have a model of lecture capture recorder which is getting to the point where they are now a support burden, older units needing to be reset every week or so - we have 80 of that model left, so next years plan is to replace them all. Our total maintenance, capital works and operating budget (excluding employees) works out to about 25% of the total asset value.

[ANDYLASER]

When I was on the road with lasers and lighting, most of my maintenance budget was time rather than expense. Keeping lasers and waggly mirrors clean and dust free was an ongoing chore. I was also aware that new lamps were going to me needed every other year and these were the biggest expense.