Multi-billion dollar government infrastructure projects in Australia provide massive opportunities for using digital intelligence to drive down costs, increase efficiency and adhere to compliance standards.
Asset Management Plans (AMPs) form the cornerstone of an effective asset management system and define the implementation of activities necessary to realise an organisation’s asset management objectives, translating to the strategic intent of the company. However, most agencies rely on a cumbersome, one off paper-based approach for managing assets.
Current Approach – labour intensive and time consuming
Existing processes used by organisations to create AMPs is unsustainable as they are currently 50-60 page static word documents. Each AMP is based on available data at the time of its creation, however becomes obsolete very soon after publishing. To make current business decisions, AMPs needs to be updated periodically to provide value to key decision makers, which is a labour intensive task.
Organisations, especially agencies managing public assets, generate large sums of potentially useful data, however, because of the limitations of the paper-based model, the majority of data is not easily accessible to colleagues and therefore not utilised effectively.
Live Asset Management Plan – enabling real-time best for business decisions
Live AMPs enable organisations to use advanced analytics to access real-time data from their asset base and be proactive in assessing and developing solutions for challenges which arise over the lifetime of an asset.
A Live AMP uses the same content as the current AMP documentation but draws in a live data and reporting functionality that enables users to make real-time decisions. By utilising this approach, an organisation will transition from a traditional AMP to an intelligent AMP. The benefits include:
- Consolidation of information in a single platform provides a holistic view of the organisation asset base.
- The AMP operates as a reporting dashboard that can be used by staff to access key asset data in a consistent format across the business.
- The data contained in the AMP is not limited to the selection of the author. Greater flexibility in presentation can allow filtering and pivoting of the charts and tables to display the data required by the user and to drill down for further analysis.
- Data is updated live from the various systems in the organisation, increasing confidence in the documents and promoting day-to-day use by various departments within the organisation as a reliable source of data.
- Easy to update AMPs with any additional information, such as KPIs.
- Compliant with ISO 55001 asset management requirements and Asset Management Accountability Framework.
- Live AMP can be easily exported to different file formats if required and easily scalable to other asset classes if required.
Implementing a Live Asset Management Plan – your business intelligence solution/optimise business assets
GHD Digital provides a business intelligence solution to implement Live AMPs for various asset classes to better manage organisations’ assets and give user accessibility to various information in a single platform.
Imagine GHD is engaged by an organisation to help design an AMP for a pumping station. We would follow the below process:
- Workshop with different parts of the business to identify information, level of granularity and format required by stakeholders.
- Identify the underlying data sources required to implement Live AMPs for pump stations.
- Conduct a maturity assessment of the data sources to understand the data quality and potential gaps.
- Conduct an ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process of the data sources to extract the data from different source systems, clean and transform the data before loading it in a central repository.
- Build a data model to create a relationship between disparate data sources for end users to customise.
- Once the foundation is established, an AMP dashboard is built on top of the data model to give the organisation a holistic view of their entire pump station asset base.
This easy-to-use business intelligence solution enables organisations to focus on data quality and accountability.
Considerations
Before building an AMP, it is important to identify what information is critical for an organisation and build a process to combine all the data together into a centralised format.
Many organisations find their current asset data to be incomplete or out of date. In such cases, a baseline of current data and its maturity must be assessed, so gaps can be filled in. Data is only valuable if it is used to make better-informed decisions, and to make those decisions, analytics is as critical as the data itself as long as the data is accurate.
Predicting Future benefits/Predicting the future?
As data becomes more mature within an organisation, it can be leveraged to move towards evidence based decision-making and for predictive analytics.
Predictive analytics can help organisations target maintenance and operations on assets, based on past performance history. This can help minimise reactive maintenance i.e. targeting assets for maintenance or replacement before they actually fail.
In summary
While Live AMP is not a new concept, organisations have struggled to adapt to new ways of working and, as a result, have lost out on potentially billions of dollars of cost-savings from the greater efficiency of new methods.
At GHD Digital, we assist our clients in the public and private sectors by utilising our extensive knowledge of the latest data-driven practices as well as our capability to deliver cost effective, bespoke solutions for clients.