Written by Chris Newson, Business Development - Strategic Asset Management, Brightly Software

Local councils are under ever-growing pressure to ensure their roads and other public assets remain safe and reliable, while at the same time having to manage tighter budgets and increased public expectations. A reactive approach – responding to issues of asset degradation only after they are noticed – is increasingly unsustainable and, especially with issues such as pothole repairs, expensive short-term fixes all-too-often use up crucial funds without delivering long-term improvements.

At Brightly, we provide councils with smart tools to break that reactive maintenance cycle to deliver a proactive methodology that moves away from a worst-first approach where all your funds are spent on a few expensive schemes and you can’t keep up with a deteriorating network.

Predictor, our digital, AI-powered solution, can foresee the multitude of issues councils face today and help them to act pre-emptively, rather than reactively, to address problems before they get out of hand – or even before they arise at all.

It does this through the process of asset investment optimisation: analysing data and strategically allocating financial resources across various assets and investment opportunities to maximise returns – all while minimising risk.

Predictor is built on three pillars:

Data

Using your asset inventory, along with key attributes about it that influence both performance and any decisions made, coupled with your performance/condition measures - be it traditional UKPMS or PAS2161 surveys, or even simple engineering assessments.

Model

Uses degradation profiles, service lives, treatment criteria, treatment effects, and life-cycle variations to understand how assets change over time.

Strategy

Incorporates unit and operational costs, budget allocations and benefit variations, enabling councils to test multiple investment choices.

Predictor provides its users with a roadmap for the future of their assets, supported by analytics and forecasts, with the user's budget in mind.

Typically, councils deal with potholes on a reactive basis, but often, these repairs last little more than a few years. This has not only resulted in funds being poorly spent, but has also led to the public becoming resentful and distrusting of their councils.

With proactive interventions saving local councils up to three times as much as reactive tactics by allowing them to assess where potholes are most at risk of appearing (based on historic data and predictive models), and carrying out regular preventive maintenance to (as much as possible) prevent them from appearing in the first place. Predictor delivers on value thanks to its ability to analyse risks, performance, conditions and budgets.

In support of this proactive approach, local councils need a structured plan in order to allocate budgets; this is where asset investment optimisation comes into play.

Asset investment optimisation

How can local authorities use asset investment optimisation and what benefits does this approach deliver?

Asset investment optimisation sits at the centre of strategic asset management. It’s the process of analysing data and strategically allocating financial resources across various assets and investment opportunities to maximise returns – all while minimising risk.

For councils, this approach enables them to carry out root cause analysis and fix problems before they manifest, rather than the traditional ‘responsive’ or ‘worst-first’ approach to asset management and maintenance, which has not necessarily delivered the most efficient or effective outcomes or demonstrated the best use of money. The predicament of pothole repairs demonstrates this perfectly.

Ultimately, this approach enables strategic decision-making by analysing multitudes of data on community requirements, budgets, historic outcomes and more.

• Risks can be assessed based on numerous factors, from regulations to environmental effects, to community size, traffic flows and infrastructure features. In addition, potential strategies for risk mitigation can be modelled and analysed.
• Budgets can be pre-planned and allocated for maximum long-term effectiveness, enabling councils to prioritise projects based on urgency, ROI and the impact they will have on the community.
• Budgets can be assessed to determine the best mix of capital and maintenance investment so that the optimum totex spend can be implemented.
• Carbon-efficient solutions can be evaluated and considered based on their cost, environmental impact and risk.
• The delivery of public services can be optimised by investing in technology and systems that improve the efficiency of the process.
• Councils can engage with their communities to find out their needs and requirements, as well as explaining their reasons for carrying out works, the methods being used and expected completion dates. This improves transparency and trust.

Local authorities will always need to strike a balance between dealing with immediate issues (which are typically the issues most visible to the public and of most concern to them) and the need to save and to plan for the future.

Cross-asset trade-off

Whilst focus often leads to road pavement, with it being a local authority’s largest asset, Predictor is asset agnostic, and the same benefits can be applied to all asset classes within the portfolio to deliver optimum capital programmes regardless of asset type. Predictor goes further than this and can support the elimination of managing assets in their respective asset class silos. By utilising cross-asset trade-off, councils can determine an equitable spend distribution over the entire asset portfolio to ensure that each asset class receives the funding it requires to meet service level goals. This can eliminate the repetition of any entrenched historical distribution of funds that may no longer be appropriate.

Driving delivery efficiencies

A key advantage of an asset agnostic tool such as Predictor is the ability to combine asset-siloed projects into unified schemes to drive delivery efficiencies. Imagine if you could see all your planned projects, whatever the asset class, in a unified manner. How easy would it then be to plan works so that a drainage scheme could be combined with a pavement scheme to result in a single project on site? By combining discrete projects into deliverable schemes with Predictor’s Work Planner functionality, councils can maximise the return on scheme delivery.

Predictor is an enormously powerful tool to help with planning and prioritisation, both for the here and now and into the future. And it does so in the most cost-effective, time-efficient manner – all while keeping risk to an absolute minimum. It’s a versatile solution that can be tailored to help each unique council balance its community’s needs, assets’ health and budget.

An investment in Predictor isn’t merely a software purchase. It’s a partnership with Brightly’s team of experienced and expert analysts, backed by Siemens, one of the world’s leading technology brands. It’s an investment in your future, and in the future of the communities you serve.

To learn more about Brightly Software and Predictor, visit: https://www.brightlysoftware.com/en-gb/products/predictor

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the CIHT or its members. Neither the CIHT nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.