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Environmental & Risk Management / Clean Building / Environmental Hazard Manager

Estimating the Costs of Addressing Hazmat Issues

After a hazmat field assessor returns from the field, cost estimators or assessment managers will review the assessment items and enter financial data concerning the cost of addressing the item.

Once financial information is entered, you can run the Hazmat Scoreboard to get an overview, complete with estimated costs for repair or abatement. You can also run the application’s financial analysis reports that deal with estimated costs, so that you can prioritize your problems and prepare to resolve these items.

Cost Estimating

Cost estimating is complicated and involves a lot of analysis. When completing the cost estimate fields, carefully consider all the steps involved in the abatement process. For example, for a simple job such as removing mold from a wall, you must estimate the costs of:

• hourly labor for the abatement worker to remove the mold
• supplies used in the abatement process such as dry ice pellets, detergents, and vacuum filters
• wear-and-tear on the equipment used in the process, such as dry ice blasting equipment or HEPA-filtered vacuums
• bags and closed containers for holding collected materials, debris, and dust
• hourly labor for painters to repaint the wall
• new paint and associated painting supplies

The more carefully you analyze the situation, the more exact your estimate will be. Calculating an accurate estimate is particularly important if you are prioritizing hazmat issues in terms of cost.

Procedure

1. Open the Manage Assessment Items task, and select the assessment project for whose assessment items you wish to estimate costs.

• The system shows the assessment items for this project that can fit in the display.
• If necessary, use the filter console to limit the list of assessment items. For example, you may wish to see items only for a particular floor or those of a particular classification.

2. Locate the assessment item for which you want to complete cost information and choose the Edit button.
3. Complete these fields:

• Cost Estimated (Expense) -- Enter the estimated cost required to remedy this item as an expense. This normally applies to items with a useful life of under one year, as otherwise you would want to treat the item as a capital cost.
• Cost Estimated (Capital) -- Enter the estimated cost required to remedy this item as a capital expenditure. This is the amount spent during a particular period to improve long-term items, such as the carpets, ceiling tiles, and pipes of your facility.

4. Save your changes.
5. You can now examine the reports with cost estimates, such as:

• Hazard Scoreboard
• Hazard Assessment Costs by Project
• Hazard Assessment Items Summary
• Hazard Activity Summary

6. With the analysis from these reports, you can begin to budget and plan how you will address your deficiencies. For information, see Addressing Assessment Deficiencies.