6.6.2 Capturing Maintenance Cost and Accomplishment Data

Introduction

The majority of asset management costs, for large transportation agencies, are contract costs for preservation, renewal, and construction of assets. However, maintenance investments have a significant impact on asset conditions and should be accounted for in a TAMP. Capturing maintenance costs for inclusion in a TAMP often poses unique challenges, because maintenance work is often delivered by in-house crews or through different contract mechanisms than major capital projects. These costs may also be tracked through different IT systems than capital costs.

When capturing costs for incorporation into a TAMP, it is also important to capture what is purchased, or accomplished, with those investments. Maintenance accomplishments are typically captured in terms of maintenance activities. However, the units of accomplishment for these activities may not easily align with asset management measures. Further the units of accomplishment may vary between work performed by in-house crews and work performed by contract.

In-House Maintenance Costs

Maintenance crews commonly report their efforts and accomplishments on a daily basis through a work reporting system. Most State DOTs currently use some form of maintenance management systems (MMS) to report work performed, along with the resulting accomplishments and costs.

In-house maintenance costs commonly include the cost of labor, equipment, materials, and overhead expenses related to work performed by maintenance field crews. These costs are captured through work order or daily report records, in which costs are associated with one or more actions, commonly called “tasks,” performed by the crew. Each task has an associated task code, which serves as a unique identifier, and a specific unit of measure for reporting accomplishments. For example, the task of “ditch cleaning” may have a unit of accomplishment of “feet,” or the task of “mowing” may have a unit of accomplishment of “acres.”

Contract Costs

Maintenance contract costs, like typical construction contract costs, are captured in terms of contract pay items. These pay items commonly do not align with the maintenance. Moreover, the unit of accomplishment may depend on the type of contract used to procure the work. For example, a contract to clean ditches may have a pay item measured in feet of ditch cleaned, cubic yards of material removed, or hours of work performed.

Maintenance contracts may be funded from an agency's Capital program or Maintenance budget. In many cases maintenance contracts funded through different programs are managed with different systems and have different means of tracking both costs and accomplishments. All of these differences can make tracking maintenance costs more challenging than the costs for other work types.

Aligning Costs from Different Sources

To incorporate maintenance costs into a TAMP, the costs from multiple sources need to be aligned in regard to both their financial components and their units of accomplishment.

The primary source of misalignment between in-house and contract maintenance costs is that in-house costs are captured through individual components of labor, equipment, materials, and overhead, whereas contract costs are captured based on pay items that combine each of these components. The labor costs captured through maintenance management systems (MMS) may or may not include an estimate of overhead costs. To facilitate comparison of in-house labor costs to contract costs an overhead multiplier should be applied. Best practices for ensuring in-house costs are accurate includes interfacing the maintenance management systems with the agency’s financial or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Once the costs are aligned financially, they must be aligned to common units of accomplishment to allow them to be incorporated into asset management analyses. The Maryland DOT State Highway Administration (MDOTSHA) and Texas DOT (TxDOT) offer two examples of how this alignment can be accomplished. These examples are taken from NCHRP Report 1076, Guide for Incorporating Maintenance Costs into a Transportation Asset Management Plan. TxDOT’s approach requires inspectors on maintenance contracts to enter daily accomplishment information into both the Capital Program management system, SiteManager, and the MMS. MDOTSHA has developed a set of Project Cost Activity (PCA) codes to track in-house maintenance expenses. These codes are incorporated into the records of all maintenance contracts to facilitate alignment of costs and accomplishments.