It's well known that the initial capital costs of a building can pale into insignificance compared with a lifetime of operating costs. But despite current research into life cycle cost assessment (LCCA), many organisations have found it difficult to apply this to the building design process − until now. With LifeCycle from IES, making decisions on capital costs alone is a risk you no longer have to take.
What Lifecycle Does:
Lifecycle makes it easy to incorporate costs for the whole life of a building into the design process. It enables you to perform LCCA at any stage of the process, using as much data as you have available, in as much detail as you wish.
How Lifecycle Works:
LifeCycle Methodology
LifeCycle provides a framework for you to take account of different costs, including capital costs, running costs, annual maintenance and replacement costs. LifeCycle calculates the Net Present Value (NPV) for the particular option, based on inflation rates and the anticipated life of the building. You can then compare different design strategies in terms of NPV.
Range of cost items
Lifecycle has five cost categories into which you can enter data, depending on the information you have available:
1. Capital cost. This can be entered manually or can be a calculated based on the model and a CostPlan cost data file.
2. Electricity and fuel costs. These can be entered along with the billing period to which the costs relate. They can be based on actual bills, or calculated using another method, such as the Deft software.
3. Annual maintenance. This can be entered as a single annual figure, or broken down into as much detail as necessary.
4. Repair costs. These include the year of repair or replacement − enabling you to define items of plant, when they will be replaced and how much they will cost. An extensive list of building services and typical economic life facilitates this strategically important cost element.
5. Costing for intermittent periods. For example, in a PFI project of 25 years, the anticipated life of the building may be 50 years. This option lets you take account of the costs for years 26 to 50.
Inflation Rates
Building life and inflation rates (general, power and fuel) are entered in order to calculate the NPV.LifeCycle Cost Data File
The data entered in LifeCycle is stored in the LifeCycle cost data file, and can be amended at any time. It can also be used in other projects.
Commercial Benefits
LifeCycle gives you a commercial edge as you can:
• calculate operational cost implications quickly and easily, helping you to define the optimum long term strategy
• use the costs data in other IES systems; for example, in Value Engineering studies.
