Optimising whole life costs at Crossrail
- OverviewRead more
The Crossrail programme will deliver a world-class railway for London and the South-East by 2018 with a capital cost budget of £15.9bn. Two key considerations for the programme were value for money and sustainability. Moorhouse supported the business planning team in developing whole life costing policy, best practice toolset and developing an implementation roadmap. Firstly, we reviewed the current Crossrail practice and global best practice and diagnosed the baseline position. We then created a tool to allow full whole life cost analysis and applied this tool to real design decisions. We handed this tool over to Crossrail, with full training and guidance, to allow the client team to start undertaking whole life costing analyses. Our work significantly raised the profile of whole life costing and sustainability goals, provided clear guidance on the value of this approach, and provided a full implementation roadmap.
- Our client's challengeRead more
The Crossrail programme is set to deliver a world-class, affordable railway, for London and the South-East by 2018. The capital cost budget for the programme is £15.9bn.
On a programme of such scale; the programme recognised that consideration of whole life costing is a key tenet of construction best practice, designed to proactively shape the design to minimise costs through procurement, construction, operation, maintenance, renewal and disposal. Such considerations also play a significant role in enhancing the sustainability performance of the programme.
Moorhouse was tasked with supporting the business planning team in researching whole life costing best practice, improving the toolset and developing an implementation roadmap.
- Our responseRead more
Firstly, we compared Crossrail against best practice to clearly define whole life costing, and diagnose the baseline position. Next, we created a tool for whole life cost analysis. Finally, we applied this to real design decisions, delivering a report for the Executive Committee with a roadmap for full implementation, a detailed user guide and identification of the issues that would impact full implementation.
The tool allows swift comparison of up to four identified options. There are three core components:
- Conventional, direct financial life cycle costs analysis, based as closely as possible on the definitions and criteria in the HM Treasury Green Book, and the whole life costing British Standard BS ISO 15686-5.
- Separate calculation of the externalities, ie carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions, both direct and indirect, priced as per the DEFRA guidance.
- A sustainability analysis framework, based on a qualitative assessment of the many elements of sustainability. The methodological approach is as per the DfT Transport Analysis Guidelines on the web (WebTAG).
The work highlighted the need for active management of the portfolio of engineering design options that trade off CapEx and whole life costs as this delivers greater benefits to the overall programme than simply allowing each project manager/engineer to make individual discrete decisions. This allows the programme to finesse the overall aggregated impact on the programme in line with funding constraints and risk appetite.
- The value to our clientRead more
The work significantly raised the profile of whole life costing and sustainability goals, provided clear guidance on the value and importance of implementing a whole life costing approach, and laid out the full implementation roadmap for the next phase of the programme.
The tool was handed over, with full training and guidance to allow Crossrail to immediately start undertaking whole life costing analyses. The scale of the programme is such that even a 0.1% saving in whole life costs is worth tens of millions of pounds.
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