Digital Systems Integration to Improve Maintenance Response Time and KIP Metrics
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Ian Hardcastle (Jacobs)
The Sydney Water Partnering 4 Success Program comprises Ventia, Jacobs and Downer as ‘Confluence Water’, providing Design, Construction and Maintenance services across northern Sydney. Co-developed program-wide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are in place to accelerate Innovation and Digital Engineering across the program. Traditional KPIs for Health & Safety, Environment and Community are in place, alongside measuring delivery performance and speed of response to reactive maintenance work-orders, and managing backlog.
The contract went live in July 2020, scaling from a bid team of around ten to over three hundred staff today, including around 80 staff employed as Mobile Technicians in the Maintenance Team.
The speed of contractor response to unplanned maintenance work orders is an important KPI for the program. The team targeted 85% compliance with required speed of response each month, but struggled to achieve this.
The team recognised intervention was required to accelerate KPI compliance. In April 2021 an automation routine was created using PowerAutomate where emails were sent to supervisors along with priority work orders of level three to six (six being highest priority). This resulted in an increase in compliance from 70% up to the 85% target within a month.
After consulting with field Technicians it became clear that an automated SMS alert defining the work order would be more useful than an email alert. This drove a further system integration to provide automated SMS alerts, achieveing a further compliance improvement.
The team felt more support to the maintenance dispatch team who controlled the apportion and dispatch work orders to Technicans across the region could be provided. A range of unconnected systems were been used to manage live vehicle location (IOT), driver trend data (ERoads), Driver of the vehicle, Work Order data (Click) and our Jacobs in-house GIS (Geospatial Information System), MapApp containing asset data, and asset locations in Esri.
The in-house innovation team created a systems integration plan to overlay these disparate data sets on to a single GIS map. Mobility of the solution was essential so it could be used by dispatch staff when off-site and on call.
On 1st April 2022 the system went live, harmonising the work order location and priority, from the client’s work order system, location of vehicle, and position of assets in a single visual display (figure 14) Immediately, Maintenance Planners could better assign technicians to work orders across the region due to improved visability of work order, vehicle type, and vehicle position. This was an improvement on the previous strategy, where crews would work in fixed geographical zones during the day with no visual oversight from Maintenance Planners. Numerous examples emerged after the integration showing how Technicians could be quickly dispatched from the control room to attend to high priority work-orders due to this improved visibility.
This paper outlines the approach taken, the lessons learned, and the positive outcomes that integrating the data sets had on improving and achieving target KPIs and efficiency.