Master Planning

PWI Master Planning is the planning of engineering needs and solutions for existing facilities and proposed future additions. It focuses on infrastructure need for:

PWI Master Plans become working tools that can be used as the backbone of multi-year budgeting and project management plans. Most of our plans have been electronically structured into data base tools.

A complete master plan includes:

  • Budgetable renewals of existing building needs (some call it a deferred maintenance plan or a capital renewal plan)
  • Capacities and demands for expanded facilities
  • Synergistic solutions to both existing and expanded needs
  • A Strategic Energy Plan for managing energy costs into the next decade or two
  • An Outline Operational Plan for the maintenance and operations of building systems into the future

Benefits

Master planning should specifically identify necessary and optional programs of renewal, expansion and enhancement for the engineering systems of a complex or campus. While there must be flexibility in spending commitments, flexibility in scheduling, and even flexibility in direction of solutions, a master plan should be a map into the future.  

Engineering master planning benefits include:

Strategic energy plan for improved efficiency and reduced, manageable energy costs.

Process

    1. PWI’s engineering master planning process generally follows a sequence of: Identification of capital renewal items—scope and budget
    2. Prioritization of capital renewal items into a multi-year renewal program
    3. Identification of “expansion” requirements on engineering infrastructure
    4. Integration of “expansion requirements” with the renewal program—along with the identification of “synergistic solutions”—the creative part
    5. Identifying the backbone of operational needs
    6. Creating a “realistic” strategic energy plan

Existing facility survey (including review of maintenance and service reports) is required to identify items that will be included in a capital renewal program. “Renewal in kind” is the first step in scoping and budgeting the renewal, knowing full well there may be a better solution. Sorting the information into finite programs is critical, just for reporting and handling.

Organizing the priorities of renewal is a deliberate step, driven by monetary availability, life safety concerns, imminent failure on critical mission equipment, and ultimately life expectancy. Re-sorting the capital renewal items into a multi-year program, often defined by budgetary limits is crucial to have a functional master plan.

Many of PWI’s master engineering plans are conducted in conjunction or at least in response to expansion and adaptation master plans by planners and architects. Through decades of experience, PWI has developed proprietary software to use master planning estimates of proposed activities to project infrastructure and utility demands and capacities. Capacity, location, relationships, qualities of service, reliability criteria, and expansionability are criteria that are used to then sort expansion requirements.

Linking and comparing renewal items to “expansion needs” should create cost saving, technology improving solutions. The solutions to nearly all of the needs can be had from many different technologies. These alternative technologies should be economically compared for “total owning and operating cost”, with the result being a recommended solution.

With new technology, revised service requirements, possibly expanded facilities, and possibly even centralized infrastructure (as compared to distributed), the operations of facilities should be “visited”. Activities and corresponding infrastructure should be organized by reliability demands, or the varying degrees of critical mission performance. 

Each section should be challenged for:

Engineering infrastructure is the heart of energy and utility demand and consumption. Master plans should identify present and future energy/utility demands, consumption and costs. Energy source forecasts should be evaluated and compared with these projections, generally resulting in the need for multi-source capability in order to manage operating costs. 

The strategic energy plan will include:

The Master Plan can be a text document organized for use, or more desirable, an electronic data base that can be “worked” over the decades to come.

Featured Projects

Ask About Master Planning at PWI: 

John McDevitt, PE
215-241-9100
jmcdevitt@pwius.com

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