Capital Planning

The Capital Planner turns reliability data into a defensible spend plan, answering which assets to replace next year and what it costs to push some off another year. See the capital planning overview.

Where to find it

Open Capital planner in the sidebar (sometimes shown as Scenarios). It opens to a portfolio view with replacement urgency, then drills into multi-year scenarios.

How it ranks assets

Each asset gets a replacement priority score from age versus expected life, condition score (recent failures, repair frequency, sensor readings), criticality, and cost of failure (downtime hours times hourly impact). Replacement cost plays into the optimization, not the priority. Tune weights under Settings, Capital planning, Weights.

Scenarios

A scenario is a what-if plan against a yearly budget over several years. The planner solves for the mix that replaces highest-risk assets first, stays under budget each year, avoids replacing too much in one facility in one year, and limits upgrade churn. Run scenarios side by side (aggressive versus conservative budget) to compare risk-reduction outcomes.

Conversational planning help

Use the global AI assistant or the capital planner's scenario workflow to ask what-if questions: what changes with 30 percent more budget next year, the risk impact of deferring all chiller replacements one year, or which ten assets would benefit most from a $500K upgrade fund. The assistant is useful for exploration and explanation, and faster than building three scenario variants by hand. Durable funding decisions belong in scenario runs so assumptions, results, and audit evidence are preserved. See Command Center and capital planning conversations.

Output and tips

A finalized scenario gives a year-by-year list ordered by month, total spend per year versus budget, risk reduction at each step, sensitivity analysis, and an exportable PDF for the budget meeting. Trust default weights, then adjust only with a clear reason. Update install dates, since age is the biggest driver and missing dates score conservatively. Re-run scenarios quarterly with fresh data; a static plan from January is stale by July. Treat the output as a plan to negotiate, not a directive. Be ready to defend your assumptions, what changes if the budget shifts plus or minus 20 percent, and the risk cost of deferring everything one year, which is the cheapest scenario but rarely the right one. Do not ignore the sensitivity analysis.