An effective asset management plan helps a Council to understand the services they provide to the community; the assets required to support delivery of those services; the value of the assets and the funding required to maintain, operate, depreciate, and replace assets; and the risks associated with owning and operating assets.
Cassowary Coast Regional Council (CCRC) approached GenEng Solutions when they were in the early stages of developing an asset management system, with different sections within Council having various levels of asset management maturity. It was recognised that the council needed a system that aligned processes, was efficient and cost effective, and could adapt to changing technology, user demand and staff changes.
GenEng produced an Asset Management Strategy report and helped the CCRC develop an Asset Management Plan.
Approach
CCRC’s Manager of Asset Engineering at that time, was a very practical asset manager and realised that the basics must first be instilled in an organisation before any complex systems are introduced. Our approach was developed bearing this in mind. The skills, knowledge and experience of the asset owners were assessed, with their participation, and the minimum requirement of the asset process was set at a level that would allow all asset owners to manage and provide information, while still providing council with the critical information to make sound decisions.
The use of NAMS+ (a guided online pathway for Asset Management planning) was recommended, and a methodology of gathering all the necessary data for NAMS+ was set in place. The reporting from NAMS+ was reconfigured to reduce the size of the asset management plan. The original document was separated into three documents. The first was the asset management strategy for CCRC, the second was general asset management process and technology, and the third was the asset class detail information. This set of documents made reading and understanding the Asset Management Plans quicker and easier for all concerned.
The Asset Owners were tasked with understanding the information from NAMS+ and correlating it to their understanding of the assets. All short, medium, and long-term plans were based off the Asset Management Plan. The Manager of Asset Engineering assisted each asset owner over the next year to achieve their asset management goals.
Challenges and Learnings
Asset Management is a difficult concept to introduce to an organisation. It is often the case that a council has an asset management section wanting to do the right things, but the asset owners are not on board. Our approach to bring the asset owners on board using basic processes helped.
The push for advanced asset management must be considered very carefully before introducing it into an organisation. Basic asset management can, and does, provide a very reasonable result with minimal effort. Pushing an organisation into advanced asset management may result in too much effort and require too much finance to be successful, and result in push-back from the asset owners.
Outcomes
The simplified, basic approach did not overwhelm Council asset owners. Instead, they saw the benefit in the process and starting using it as a tool for planning.