Capital funds are always limited, and the future is never certain.  Structuring a balanced capital plan requires you to coordinate information, analyze alternatives, and build consensus.  Plans must remain flexible as needs and resources change.  How to efficiently manage the capital planning and budgeting lifecycle while encompassing all factors into consideration is one of the biggest challenges faced by any capital planning professionals.  Without a tool for dynamically managing processes and information, you risk making large capital investments for the wrong project at the wrong time. 

The UAO solution is driven by the implementation of the CIPAce platform of our partner, CIPPlanner.  CIPAce™ is a solution (which can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise) that provides organizations the tools necessary to manage the planning of multiple projects and programs over a long planning horizon.  It facilitates the creation of a planning environment that can gather a wide variety of projects, impacts, priorities, and funding requirements that must be taken into account as part of the planning process.  It also creates an environment where these impacts, priorities and requirements can be managed dynamically. Not only are fund projections and capital budgets captured, but also are the qualitative aspects such as legal requirements, environmental impacts, green initiatives, public safety, and operating impacts.   Long-term, mid-term and short-term planning processes can be converged and managed under a unified planning framework.

The solution can be implemented as a module which integrates with other components in the enterprise architecture, or the entire suite can be deployed to handle the planning and budgeting functions as well as the program and project management. 

Some of the key features include:

• Manage Project Proposal – Collect, evaluate and monitor project proposals from multiple internal and external sources.
• Capital Project Submission - All proposals that pass a preliminary evaluation process will be submitted as a formal project candidate into the planning process.  CIPAce™ Workflow Engine can support the automatic review and approval process with project submission and evaluation.
• Project Financial Analysis - Evaluate a project’s financial projection and support various capital planning models.
• Project Impact Analysis - Analyze other impact areas, such as resources, environmental, public safety, and regulatory compliance that are of importance for your organization. 
• Project Ranking - Prioritize portfolio projects against organizational goals and priorities. 
• Project Filtering - Determine project funding status using a rule-based automated scenario iterative approach.
• Funding Source Projection - Dynamically manage the link between available funding and proposed projects
• Fund Allocation - Allocate from multiple funds for projects by either dollar or by percentage.
• Capital Plan Review & Approval - All approved projects are bundled together and submitted as a capital plan for review using review workflow supported by CIPAce™ Workflow Engine.
• Capital Budget Development & Management - Support life cycle budget management needs, including creation, modification, transfer, approval, and monitoring.
• Project Execution - manage the execution of project
• Asset Management & Condition Assessment - Manage assets created from capital programs and their conditions.  Conditions of the assets become factors that will drive future capital plans.