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Structures, Systems, Spreadsheets, and the High Stakes of Capital Planning with Large Portfolios

Posted by Kirsten Deysher on Monday, August 11, 2025

Poker chips stacked next to a hand of cards showing a King and an Ace.

Facilities leaders face a blunt truth: “If you don't have an objective assessment to guide decision-making on your buildings, you’re likely over/underspending, exposing risk, and losing operational ground.”

Deferred maintenance, aging infrastructure, and unpredictable capital expenditures are no longer manageable through gut instinct or scattered spreadsheets. In industries like healthcare, education, and manufacturing—especially for buildings over 100,000 square feet, campus settings, or systems like steam boilers or chilled water plants—the cost of not knowing is growing exponentially.

Maybe you are reading this and you do know your buildings and your systems intimately, or you can identify the person on your team that does. If you know, can you communicate with consistent data across your campus and healthcare system? What happens if you or the only person who does know the information retires or resigns? How is this information documented to prevent that institutional knowledge from walking out the door?

That’s where Facility Condition Assessments (FCAs) come in —they provide organizations with data-driven insights to prioritize investments, extend asset life, and reduce costly surprises.

The High Stakes of Facility Performance

Whether you’re a hospital system, educational institution, manufacturer, or commercial property manager, your buildings are complex, capital-intensive assets. Their performance directly affects:

Mission impact.
Revenue generation. Liabilities. Debt capacity. Credit rating.
Risk management. Uptime and energy use.
Client, patient, tenant experience and satisfaction.

Yet, most facility portfolios were built in different decades with different systems and lifecycle assumptions. What happens when your chiller goes down and surgeries can’t happen? Or consider your boiler plant that is 35 years old and still “working”—until it doesn’t. That’s not a strategy. That’s a liability.

FCAs: Your Blueprint for Smarter Spending

Entech Engineering’s Facility Condition Assessment services provide an unbiased, data-backed evaluation of your assets—from roof to foundation, HVAC to fire protection, and everything in between.

Here's what sets us apart:

Depth: Typical FCAs are visible based assessments. We go beyond the checklists, behind the walls, and above the ceilings, including non-visible systems. Our engineers and analysts examine systems, performance, and degradation patterns in detail—critical for high-stakes assets like central utilities and steam systems.
Clarity: Our deliverables aren’t static PDFs. It is live software with real-time analytic, customizable outputs that can be generated as needed to provide relevant information at each stage of planning and project implementation, from high-level reports of multi-year funding plans to overall building, individual system, and specific project reports. We provide prioritized, budget-aligned capital plans with 5–10 year outlooks.
Experience: We’ve assessed millions of square feet for healthcare, education, manufacturing and industrial, and a myriad of other clients from commercial buildings to churches and nonprofits.

These organizations used our FCA findings to secure funding, phase critical upgrades, reduce emergency repairs, and extend the useful life of their facilities.

What You Gain from a Quality FCA

“I was extremely skeptical when we started this project, however, I am extremely pleased with the results and data provided from Entech's FCA. Not only has it provided PPMC with quality data on our building and assets, it has provided Penn Medicine, as a whole, with consistent data and language, that allows us to better communicate between the hospitals and team members.”
– Hospital Executive, Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA

Enhanced Communications, Better Planning

Replace guesswork with multiyear capital forecasting. Know the true cost of deferred maintenance. Build trust with boards, CFOs, and regulators.

Efficiency

Reallocate O&M dollars to where they’ll have the biggest impact. Identify energy-saving retrofits, too.

Visibility = Risk Reduction

Know exactly what systems are failing, nearing end-of-life, or silently draining resources. Avoid compliance violations, client/patient complaints, downtime, and litigation due to building failures.

Capital Readiness

Whether you’re pursuing grants, bond issues, or internal allocations—having a formal FCA boosts credibility.

Who Should Act Now?

It’s time to schedule an FCA if:

You manage over 100,000 square feet of space.
You haven’t updated your capital plan in 3+ years.
You’re running older steam systems or chilled water plants.
You’re facing budget uncertainty or public funding pressures.
You’ve had two or more unplanned failures in the last 12 months.

Entech’s Invitation: Make More Informed Decisions.

With Entech, you gain a proactive partner—not just an engineering vendor. We help you build capital resilience, unlock savings, and strengthen trust between facilities and leadership teams.