Digitalizing Physical Assets: The Toowoomba Regional Council Story

When Garry Willocks took his role in business transformation and strategy at the Toowoomba Regional Council, the organization had a disparate approach to managing its assets, with information and data residing in several silos.

Realizing that this impeded the efficient and effective management of the council’s 540,000 assets, the council created an integrated asset management team and implemented a new enterprise resource planning system.

Willocks, originally a telecommunications engineer, arrived in the role with a mandate to drive a more integrated and holistic approach to asset management.

“We look to bring all the asset management practices in the organization together to improve efficiency and functionality,” he says. “There’s accounting data around finance and depreciation, but also the spatial representation of assets we can bring into the ERP system.”

“There’s also a GIS (Geographic Information System) which is another technology we lock onto, and we are trying to integrate that core information and make it into good information which can be a point of truth, and from that, we have a centralized register to make all the decisions,” he continues.

Managing ERP like a car

These decisions span planning and financial depreciation and expense and overall lifecycle costs, which – at the end of the financial year – enable the council to understand the costs it has incurred in delivering services from the assets.

Willocks also uses a predictive modeling and optimization tool within the ERP system, which “crunches all of the models” to deliver insights on asset risk based on age and condition.

This helps in driving decisions on renewing or repairing assets before their useful economic life ends.

“We look to bring all the asset management practices in the organization together to improve efficiency and functionality”

He likens this to car ownership. Repairing and maintaining a vehicle is a minimal cost for many years, but there comes a point where significant repairs need to be made and parts replaced.

“There does come a time when the cost of maintaining these assets starts to increase, and that is what gets highlighted by the predictive modeling tool,” he says.

“We’ll have a budget for water infrastructure services, for example, and a certain proportion will be operational maintenance, and there are capital renewals and new acquisitions coming on board. So it all plays a part in creating a commentary to the corporate finance staff to help them determine our liability going forward.”

These insights are also used to determine the overall sustainability of the council and its assets.

Making automation part of ERP

Another current initiative is automation and taking more than six million information links on the GIS platform into the ERP system.

This was done only partially through manual processes in the past. Operators need to create files, export them and load them again, but now they are being automated and taken into a cloud environment, where storage is not an issue and analytical tools can also be applied.

If a staff member updates information on the GIS platform, these changes are automatically updated on the ERP, and the single — and up-to-date — version of the truth is maintained.

Some of the decisions, says Willocks, have involved deciding whether to use modules in the ERP system or integrate existing legacy modules performing the same function with the ERP system.

In some cases, the ERP modules were deemed not sufficiently mature. In others, decisions were driven by cost and cultural reasons, with groups of users comfortable with the status quo and satisfied that ERP integration would deliver a good result.

This coincided with moving from an on-premises to a cloud environment, which Willocks says could have gone more smoothly than it did.

Transforming asset management

Overall, however, the council has used its digital transformation to drive a transformation in how it manages its physical assets, and this is being done to deliver improvements in terms of cost and quality of service delivery.

“There are so many things we can do as an organization to improve our financial sustainability and our understanding of the task of strategic asset management,” says Willocks.

“And as a ratepayer myself, I have a vested interest.”

Willocks believes that Toowoomba is improving its asset management performance due to the more holistic approach and has a positive cultural influence.

“In the early days, there was very little known about all of this, and we were very segmented,” he says.

“Now we are more and more coming together to work together on our processes. We’re still not quite there yet, but it’s getting better all the time.”

Lachlan Colquhoun is the Australia and New Zealand correspondent for CDOTrends and the NextGenConnectivity editor. He remains fascinated with how businesses reinvent themselves through digital technology to solve existing issues and change their entire business models. You can reach him at [email protected].

Image credit: iStockphoto/nlyyouqj