Case Study: City of Calgary closes infrastructure funding gap and optimizes asset investment with PowerPlan

How the City of Calgary Addressed the Infrastructure Gap

The City of Calgary, a municipal government serving 1.266 million residents, faced a corporate-wide infrastructure and asset-investment gap: asset managers lacked integrated lifecycle-costing tools and a consistent process for long-range capital planning. To address this, the City issued an RFP and selected PowerPlan’s Asset Investment Optimization Suite to enable lifecycle costing, capital planning, and strategic asset investment across business units.

PowerPlan ran a year-long pilot and then rolled the Asset Investment Optimization Suite out to 13 business units, establishing a consistent optimization methodology and integrated long-range plans. The solution quantified funding gaps, improved cross-functional communication, implemented common standards, and reduced workloads (some teams report saving months; a fire department can produce council-ready lifecycle reports in a single day and building managers run multi-project reports in about 10 minutes), enabling more defendable funding requests and portfolio-level decision making.

City of Calgary