Benefits of Whole Life Costing
We must remember that Whole Life Costing is an approach to support excellent decision making. There are several significant benefits to taking such an approach:
- Better Planning – Whole Life Costing will add (where possible) a greater level of detail to planning within The University. It will help to provide internal customers and project managers with relevant information to help with effective planning
- Transparent Decision Making – a commitment to WLC will provide a framework that can be used to support business decisions. If WLC is supported across The University, it can help to develop a greater shared understanding of how and why difficult planning and budget decisions are being made
- Realistic Long-Term Budgeting –any ambitious long-term capital programme will include financial implications in terms of revenue costs for service and maximising the value delivered by the building. A commitment to WLC will provide a much better understanding of these financial implications to support integrated and long-term financial planning.
An alternative way of looking at this is how we develop the resilience of our decision-making process. This is illustrated below as the difference between basic and transformational decision making.