L4M7 CIPS Whole Life Asset Management Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Explanation

The purposes of a warehouse are to keep the inventories in good condition and to ensure that the operations is smooth. In the scenario, the warehouse has 2 stories, with goods-in and goods-out areas located on the ground floor and a lift connecting the stories. The lift could become a bottleneck if the goods inside the warehouse are not well-arranged.

Since the lift is often small with limited load capacity, putting heavy bulk items on the first floor will cause bottleneck and increase the chance of accidents. Therefore, palletised items (even they have low-usage) should be placed on the ground floor. Smaller and lighter items should be stored on the first floor.

This QUESTION NO: does appear in the real exam. To answer the question, students should imagine the situation.

Hiring is often preferred when:

Frequency of use is low: If equipment is only needed occasionally, hiring is more economical.

Storage is unavailable: Leased equipment needs storage, which incurs additional costs.

Lease costs exceed hiring costs for limited use.

Whole-life asset management emphasizes cost-efficient solutions, and hiring equipment for limited use reduces unnecessary expenses compared to leasing or purchasing.

Explanation

Scheduled maintenance is any repair and upkeep work performed within a set timeframe. It details when given maintenance tasks are performed and by whom. Scheduled maintenance may occur at repeating intervals or in response to a work request.

"Overhauling of machine" means that the machine is regularly checked and corrupted parts are replaced if needed.

"Cleaning of tank" and "Oil changes" also occur at time intervals as scheduled

So the correct answer is "Repair signage damage from a recent storm"

Explanation

Direct and indirect costs of holding inventory include the following:

1. Acquisition costs

2. Holding costs (carrying costs) are the costs associated with the storage and handling of physical stock. There are two different types of holding costs:

a. Costs related to the value of the goods: financial costs (i.e. the interest on the working capital tied up in inventory, which may be the bank borrowing rate or the company's target for return on capital); cost of insurance; losses due to product deterioration; losses due to obsolescence and redundancy of inventory; losses due to theft, accidental damage etc.

b. Costs related to the physical characteristics of the inventory include the following: storage space; power, heat and lighting of the store; movement equipment; labour costs; administration costs.

3. Costs of stockouts

Multi-story warehouses provide:

Flexible storage options for various inventory types, based on volume, weight, and movement frequency.

Cost savings on land: As vertical space is utilized, less land is needed for the same storage volume, potentially reducing property expenses.

Whole-life asset management considers these factors to maximize storage efficiency while managing real estate costs.

Explanation

All risk management processes follow the same basic steps, although sometimes different jargon is used to describe these steps. Together these 5 risk management process steps combine to deliver a simple and effective risk management process.

Step 1: Identify the Risk. You and your team uncover, recognize and describe risks that might affect your project or its outcomes. There are a number of techniques you can use to find project risks. During this step you start to prepare your Project Risk Register.

Step 2: Analyze the risk. Once risks are identified you determine the likelihood and consequence of each risk. You develop an understanding of the nature of the risk and its potential to affect pro-ject goals and objectives. This information is also input to your Project Risk Register.

Step 3: Evaluate or Rank the Risk. You evaluate or rank the risk by determining the risk magni-tude, which is the combination of likelihood and consequence. You make decisions about whether the risk is acceptable or whether it is serious enough to warrant treatment. These risk rankings are also added to your Project Risk Register.

Step 4: Treat the Risk. This is also referred to as Risk Response Planning. During this step you assess your highest ranked risks and set out a plan to treat or modify these risks to achieve acceptable risk levels. How can you minimize the probability of the negative risks as well as enhancing the opportunities? You create risk mitigation strategies, preventive plans and contingency plans in this step. And you add the risk treatment measures for the highest ranking or most serious risks to your Project Risk Register.

Step 5: Monitor and Review the risk. This is the step where you take your Project Risk Register and use it to monitor, track and review risks.

Explanation

Costs of holding inventory include the following:

• Acquisition cost

• Inventory holding cost

• Costs of stock-outs

Acquisition costs follow the typical procure-to-pay model. Benefits of procure-to-Pay (P2P) software include:

- Vendor Management, which includes researching, selecting, engaging with, and evaluating the performance of suppliers who make up your supply chain.

- Purchase Requisition Workflows, or the formal process of creating and submitting a purchase requisition (PR) for approval to meet a specific business need.

- Purchase Order (PO) Workflows, covering the creation of a formal, detailed PO from the purchase requisition, including information on the quantity and quality of goods and services, as well as specific terms and conditions.

- Receiving, which includes the acceptance of physical goods (or review of quality and completion for services) and entering the accepted order into inventory, tracking, and accounting systems.

- Invoice Management, during which the invoice is compared to the original PO to verify pricing, quality, quantity, and terms have been met.

- Accounts Payable Workflows, wherein the accounts payable department processes the invoice for payment, submits the payment to the vendor, and reconciles any related financial entries in the accounting system.

The software is intended to help reduce the acquisition costs.

LO 2, AC 2.2

Explanation

Maintenance can represent a significant portion of the cost in asset intensive organisations (such as Sidel - a food processor), as breakdowns have an impact on the capacity, quality and cost of operation. However, the formulation of a maintenance strategy depends on a number of factors, including the cost of down time, reliability characteristics and redundancy of assets. Consequently, the balance between preventive maintenance (PM) and corrective maintenance (CM) for minimising costs varies between organisations and assets. Nevertheless, there are some rules of thumb on the balance between PM and CM, such as the 80/20 rule.

Preventive maintenance is a type of proactive maintenance, while corrective maintenance is an example of reactive maintenance. Therefore, the answer should be "Balance between proactive maintenance and reactive maintenance".

Explanation

In principle, use of any materials involves an environmental cost. Some packaging materials use a lot of natural resources and energy to produce. The journey taken by packaging from raw material to manufacturing and then to the initial user also incurs a 'carbon footprint'. The weight of packag-ing contributes to the fuel usage of vehicles while the volume used can add up to additional jour-neys or the use of larger vehicles. Finally, the reuse, return, disposal or recycling will also involve additional to the environmental cost.

In this question:

- 'Purchase the packaging materials in bulk' may incur additional fuel and carbon footprint in delivering these materials

- 'Try to reduce the costs of packaging' may prompt the organisation to use less eco-friendly and cheap materials like polystyrene chips

- 'Not use the packaging materials at all' can increase the environmental performance of packag-ing activities, but it also harms the products to be delivered and may cause other environmental problems (i.e. spillage of toxic chemicals into the environment)

So the correct answer should be: 'Adopt international environmental packaging standards'. The International Standards Organisation (ISO) has published several standards regarding packaging and environment, namely ISO 18601, ISO 18602, ISO 18603, ISO 18604, ISO 18605, ISO 18606.

Explanation

The main improvements from ERP to ERP II are the following:

- ERP II is web enabled as compared to Conventional ERP Which is not.

- ERP is restricted to provide selected exhaustive or rigorous or wide-spread coverage in its mod-ules. But as compared to ERP, ERP II provides the true and accurate blend of the macro and the micro and affords customers with curative actions/measures after identifying the slip-up/error or fault;

- ERP was embattled more headed for manufacturing or industrialization and the dilemma or difficulty is conquer in ERP II by endowing clarification for all kind of industries and sectors.

- ERP is not in the position or could not possibly integrate/incorporate diverse functions from di-verse departments/divisions but ERP II could possibly do so as well as from different industries as compared to conventional ERP.

- For WEB and WAP connectivity ERP II grip CRM and SCM Functionalities.

- ERP II be obliged the function and purpose to an external/outdoor one and smooth the progress of better networks than remaining as internal/interior application.

Explanation

Economic order quantity (EOQ) was developed in 1913 by Ford W. Harris and has been refined over time. The formula assumes that demand, ordering, and holding costs all remain constant. The EOQ minimizes the total annual inventory cost.

EOQ formula is as follow:

LO 2, AC 2.3

When disposing of hazardous waste, it is essential to:

Identify the type of waste: Some waste requires special handling and disposal by certified organizations.

Comply with legislation: Proper disposal is mandated by local, national, or international waste management laws, ensuring public safety and environmental protection.

Whole-life asset management emphasizes responsible decommissioning practices to minimize environmental impact and adhere to regulatory compliance.

Including end-of-life packaging costs is essential when dealing with hazardous materials, as they often require special packaging and labeling for safe disposal. Whole-life asset management considers disposal costs in the total lifecycle cost to ensure compliance with regulations and prevent environmental harm.

Explanation

There are different types of maintenance that organizations use to increase the uptime of their assets and utility of their facilities. Based on an organization’s budget, amount of resources, level of combined experience, and maintenance goals, one or more maintenance types are used.

Proactive types of maintenance

Preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance is the most popular type of proactive maintenance. To start conducting preventive maintenance tasks (PMs), an organization does not need to purchase new technology if it already has a CMMS. This is not the case with predictive maintenance which requires condition monitoring sensors and new software integrations. However, with preventive maintenance, the or-ganization runs the risk of over-scheduling maintenance tasks because tasks are scheduled based on time rather than actual conditions. That said, preventive maintenance achieves 12% to 18% cost savings over reactive maintenance.

Predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance (PdM) is what savvy maintenance teams aspire to have or are already im-plementing. The major barrier to PdM is the time it takes to implement rather than the cost of the technology itself. For instance, a vibration sensor that can identify imbalance, misalignment, and resonance issues only costs around $200. But the time it takes to install, integrate with other maintenance software, and adopt a culture around is not time that all organizations are willing to allocate. For those that do allocate the time, PdM provides an 8% to 12% cost savings over preventive maintenance.

Condition-based maintenance

Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is at the core of predictive maintenance but, on its own, does not rely on technology to determine the condition of an asset like PdM does. For instance, a manager may instruct an operator to monitor the condition of an asset and submit a work request when a specific condition is met. This approach may, or may not be, as reliable as predictive maintenance. An organization that has highly-trained operators may spot hazardous conditions better than an organization using PdM technology that doesn’t know what to look for.

Scheduled maintenance

Scheduled maintenance includes work that is scheduled on a calendar for completion. The most common type of scheduled maintenance is calendar-based preventive maintenance tasks. These are scheduled well in advance of completion. For instance, an asset with a monthly PM has twelve instances of scheduled maintenance in a given year. However, just because maintenance is scheduled does not mean it’s planned. Planned maintenance implies that a maintenance planner or other type of maintenance worker has fully planned for parts, materials, skills, and other resources to be available during the scheduled time window.

Planned maintenance

Planned maintenance is work that’s prepared for in advance of it taking place. According to an UpKeep survey, it’s also the most popular key performance indicator (KPI) to track. A high planned maintenance percentage indicates that a maintenance team will have resources available to complete work for the time/day the work is scheduled for. Having a high planned maintenance percentage also helps boost other maintenance KPIs like schedule compliance. More planned maintenance means more successful completion of scheduled maintenance.

Routine maintenance

Routine maintenance is a form of time-based maintenance and preventive maintenance, though some organizations differentiate between routine maintenance and preventive maintenance. They use the latter for smaller tasks (i.e. cleaning) performed at higher frequencies (hourly, daily) and the former for larger tasks (i.e. inspections) performed at lower frequencies (weekly, monthly, annually). Additionally, routine maintenance is performed by operators, janitors, and other staff member while preventive maintenance is performed by technicians. Non-routine maintenance includes maintenance that is performed reactively or only when needed based on an asset’s conditions.

Reactive types of maintenance

Emergency maintenance

Emergency maintenance occurs when an asset requires immediate attention in order to keep a facility operational or safe. This is the most reactive and intrusive type of maintenance as it pulls technicians away from other jobs and lowers schedule compliance. In extreme circumstances, emergency maintenance can set an organization back days depending on the scope of the repair, available parts, and the asset’s level of importance. To reduce the amount of emergency maintenance that is both unplanned and unscheduled, organizations adopt various forms of proactive maintenance.

Corrective maintenance

Corrective maintenance is inherently part of emergency maintenance because, when there is an emergency, something needs corrected or fixed. In this way, corrective maintenance is mostly reactive. However, it can also be proactive. If an asset with a condition monitoring sensor detects an issue, a work order is created and a technician is sent to correct it. Similarly, preventive maintenance is considered corrective maintenance if there is an issue to fix. This is rare though as PMs are often conducted when an asset is in good working order.

Other types of maintenance

Deferred maintenance

Deferred maintenance includes repairs and inspections that are put into a backlog due to limited budget and resources. While deferring maintenance saves money up front, the costs of not performing important maintenance compounds at 7% annually. Rising costs come from fines resulting from missed inspections and unscheduled downtime that brings production to a standstill. By far, deferred maintenance and emergency maintenance are the least desired types of maintenance.

Total productive maintenance

Total productive maintenance (TPM) is the broadest type of maintenance that targets more than the assets that need maintained. It also aims to improve employee satisfaction and overall morale in the workplace, specifically in manufacturing plants. TPM does this by increasing overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and the amount of planned maintenance. More planned work means more workers have the resources they need to do their job, which means higher levels of satisfaction. TPM also leverages machine operators to participate in maintenance and take ownership of their equipment.