Your Asset Management Journey

Asset managers are responsible for maintaining the physical infrastructure that provides essential services for their community. This includes many inter-related asset types. These assets are critical to maintaining our standard of living, safety, well-being and economic prosperity at all levels of government.

These assets can include:

  • Road and bridges
  • Culverts
  • Water distribution networks
  • Sidewalks
  • Wastewater systems
  • Buildings
  • Water treatment plants
  • Equipment
  • Signs
  • more

Your community’s asset management journey will be unique

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While most agencies begin their asset management journey with pavements, your roadmap to successful asset management can start with any asset.

Regardless of which assets you manage, your Enterprise Asset Management Solution must provide insight and visibility into all physical assets while recognizing that each asset has unique maintenance and repair criteria. A single platform solution allows for effortless access to data, allowing the agency to make more educated, strategic, tactical, and operational asset management decisions.

Why having all your assets managed together makes sense

  • Increase collaboration – Nobody wants to run a siloed business with each department functioning separate from the other (e.g. roads vs bridges). Collaboration between departments is a crucial and necessary part of the business. For example, you will need to combine work programs from multiple assets (roads and subsurface utilities) to provide the least amount of disruption to your community. A web-based, enterprise wide solution makes it easy and accessible for every member of your team. While it is possible to collaborate across multiple platforms or software modules, the data isn’t easily integrated, and the reports are often not fully inclusive of all the data available. Instead, using role-based security, agencies can ensure the data is protected and only the data critical to job execution is available, while managers and directors can view all the information across their entire agency.
  • Less IT Work - Technology infrastructures are tremendously complex, typically running applications and data in silos that can limit the effectiveness of cross organizational operations and efficiencies. Dealing with one enterprise system, not a modular based solution, means there is no need to return to a software vendor when you add a new asset in your asset management journey.
  • Report on Multiple Assets - Having your assets in one solution not only allows you to publish out of the box reports but enables you to create dashboards from various business intelligence tools on the market. This becomes more time consuming if your data resides in separate asset solutions. Additionally, having all your analysis results in one solution provides quicker access to data for Cross Asset Analysis reporting.

What makes these asset management systems work?

Enterprise asset management solutions will feature a Common Asset Registry as their foundation. A Common Asset Registry will document the assets you own and manage. The asset registry will outline the infrastructure owned by your agency, describes individual sections of infrastructure, and documents key attributes of each section such as the location, age and current replacement cost. All transactions regardless of the application (mobile, external enterprise system such as a GIS of dashboard) are recorded against the asset eliminating the duplication of data and having multiple sources of the "truth".

A Web Service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Web services will pull and push data from your common asset registry to other systems in your enterprise. For example, the user of a mobile application in the field will consume information from the asset registry. The web service pulls the data into the mobile app.

Next Steps

Now that we have discussed the value of integrating your assets on one platform, where do you start? The following are six items need to be discussed by your organization prior to implementating a new asset in your enterprise asset management solution:

1. Determine what OUTCOMES you are looking for:

  • Strategic Planning versus Tactical Planning versus Operational management?
  • Preservation versus Rehabilitation versus Replacement strategies?
  • Are all assets the same or are some more critical than others?
  • Condition based, level of service based or risk-based analysis?
  • Prioritization or optimization?
  • Integration across assets?
  • Is it worth it – are you spending dollars to save pennies?

2. Determine what the asset is and to what level you will analyze the asset?

Each asset will be different. Some examples include:

  • Structures - Roof, Walls, Exterior Doors, Windows
  • Systems – HVAC, Electrical, Plumbing
  • Fixtures
  • Furnishings
  • Serviceability - Office space, Storage space
  • Fleet Equipment - Engine, Drive Train, Brakes, Body, Interior Components
  • Signalized Intersections - Mast Arms and Span Wire, Controller Cabinets, Controllers, Lights (Lenses, Bulbs, Visors)
  • Detectors

3. Determine performance measures / condition indexes

4. Determine performance prediction models

  • Condition / Level of Service / Risk

5. Determine treatment models

  • Triggers, resets and costs
  • Determine economic parameters
  • Budget categories, budgets, inflation, discount

6. Determine data sources and integration requirements

Once you finish with these steps you can proceed to set up your software solution to accommodate the new asset type. To see how this is accomplished in dTIMS contact us today.