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Snow, floods and strikes - Solving the Public Sector headache of effective Asset Management

ISO 55000 defines Asset Management as the "coordinated activity of an organisation to realise value from assets". Asset management is one of the few areas where a public sector organisation has a working relationship directly with the community it is serving. Effective, agile asset management is bigger than just simply getting something to somewhere. Andy Worwood, Senior Sales Executive at IFS UK, looks at how new agile, cost effective cloud-based software solutions can help modernise service delivery for public services to get the most from resources and achieve the required service levels while minimising whole life costs and complying with government requirements.

Asset management – that of physical assets, infrastructure, as well as fixed assets – is a challenge public sector bodies and local authorities across the world face constantly. Whether the authority is in Boston US or Bristol UK, São Paulo Brazil or Stockholm Sweden, each has to ensure that it knows what assets it has, where they are, that they are properly maintained and ready to be deployed – particularly essential when the snowstorm strikes, disaster relief operations are required or striking workers mean the Government has to step in.

In practice, achieving this is rather difficult. All public sector organisations have to maintain a huge amount of operational assets – whether this is transport assets such as waste disposal trucks and buses or housing, land and buildings which incorporate schools and other public places. And when disaster strikes, these organisations must ensure that assets are available and ready to work at short notice – snow ploughs must be ready when snow strikes at major airports, for example – not be in the repair depot requiring maintenance or fitted with the wrong equipment.

The scale of the challenge
In the UK it is estimated that fixed assets which are owned by local authorities alone are worth nearly £239 billion, making them the second most costly resource after staff to manage. £220 billion of this amount is in operational assets alone.

This scenario is played out in varying scales globally so one challenge is particularly clear – the support service needed to manage these assets through life must be not only capable, available and reliable but also usable and flexible enough to be able to optimise all assets in real-time, manage maintenance and repair actions to keep them operational and ensure effective tracking of all associated costs.

JAMES is on hand
Solutions exist to overcome these challenges, and are already operational in comparable, if not more demanding environments. Looking at one example in the Public Sector; the UK MOD’s implementation of the Joint Asset Management and Engineering Solutions (JAMES) is already contributing huge benefits to the British Army. This covers the Whole Fleet Management of all land vehicles and associated equipment used by the UK Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.

This solution has been in use since 2005 and is based on IFS Applications. It provides a managed service that continues to operate well within all Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The solution has consistently returned 100 percent system availability while supporting more than 11,000 users and processing approximately 4 million transactions per month (or approximately 170,000 transactions per day).

The IFS Applications software at the heart of JAMES is able to support all of this effectively by providing a system that enables optimised asset usage with minimum fleet sizes by providing capabilities including asset information, identification, configuration and maintenance as well as monitoring current usage and providing trend analysis. This whole-life, Asset Management model is flexible enough to be applicable across a range of industries including the public sector.

IFS Enterprise Asset Management – At your service
An agile, flexible and modular solution is ideal for public sector organisations requiring a focused solution that is able to address critical business issues and can co-exist and integrate with current business systems with minimal business disruption. Overall, the main requirement remains consistent throughout this and other industries, that of modernising service delivery and getting the most out of all existing resources.

Effective asset management enables this to be done efficiently, providing exceptional services to the public which aligns with their local priorities and the service levels people have come to expect these days. The UK’s G-Cloud Digital Marketplace has been established by the Crown Commercial Service to promote and make simple the procurement of Cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. IFS’s EAM solution is one of several tailored business solutions available via the G-cloud Framework meeting Government Information Management security principles and ready to deploy in support of the Government asset management requirements.

Maintaining standards
The standards of practice have many influences which are key here. All Government bodies and authorities are bound by comprehensive SLAs which define the parameters for the delivery of a service for the benefit of both parties. This is alongside stringent government policies which dictate the regulation of service including that of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) which sets out certain public sector asset management guidelines.

Building the foundations for an integrated approach to asset management
Such granular levels of detail if integrated into a holistic asset management solution provide the landscape for asset-heavy organisations such as those in the public sector to streamline and refine their asset management programmes. This would involve removing information silos, aligning assets to business priorities, and assessing asset performance. The cycle of information being constantly fed back into the solution means that information is always updated and can be managed in real time. If an asset is determined to be ineffective in a specific area, or needs more support, this can be addressed quickly and with minimum disruption while at the same time providing valuable data to improve management of the assets in the future.

When asset management is integrated into the wider organisation providing a simple and manageable 360 degree view of operational business processes, it is possible to streamline and modernise service delivery to meet the organisation and – by default – the individual asset's needs.

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