Case study highlights

  • Delivered increased clarity
  • Allowed for greater long-term planning
  • Council was able to avoid a budget shortfall with greater oversight

The Challenge

The City of Canning is located in Perth’s south-eastern suburbs, about 10 kilometres from the Perth CBD, and services more than 99,000 residents across 16 suburbs.

The Council has been a TechnologyOne customer since 2016, when Canning selected the OneCouncil Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to enhance their internal operations. Included in the OneCouncil solution is TechnologyOne’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) business capability.

The City of Canning has many assets that it is responsible for managing and maintaining, as well as needing to plan for the development of future assets and infrastructure to continue to meet community needs.

Whilst the Council already had TechnologyOne’s EAM solution, they wanted greater clarity into their assets’ needs to inform their long-term plans. Already being a TechnologyOne customer, and familiar with our Strategic Asset Management (SAM) capability, Canning decided to implement the solution so they could effectively plan and budget for the long-term, ensuring they had enough money put aside to meet future needs.

The Solution

The City of Canning started the process of implementing SAM four years ago. Since then, the Council has implemented SAM for buildings, which they have taken from core to advanced level, as well as parks and recreation, footpaths, plant and fleet, and their drainage network.

“[SAM] gave us a long-term outlook. We were able to then understand those [assets] and then inform our long-term financial plan. We wanted to ensure that over a 10-year period, we were planning to put aside enough money to service those assets’ needs. That became the real focus and benefit that we got from SAM,” said Kevin Gill, Leader Asset Management, City of Canning.

“By understanding what our asset needs were, we were able to then apply them to the services that are delivered. SAM allows you to understand how much you need to either maintain or modify your existing levels of service.”

During the process of implementing SAM, the City of Canning have realised numerous key learnings. Their biggest piece of advice – go at your own pace.

“You don’t have to rush the process, but you also don’t have to have everything in place,” Mr. Gill outlined. “A lot of organisations are faced with ‘do I have enough data; do I have the inputs I need to deliver meaningful and useful asset management plans through SAM?’ Yes, it’s important, yes, the accuracy and the reliability of those will yield better results. But you can also use a top-down approach.”

This was the approach that the City of Canning took. The Council began with a basic understanding of their assets – what they were, where they were located, what sort of asset condition they were in, and what the replacement costs were. With this information, they were able to take a top-down approach and fill in the gaps through assumptions, local experience, and the knowledge of their asset custodians. With this information they were able to prepare some modelling.

With this modelling, Canning was able to begin informing the long-term financial plan, albeit with a lower level of confidence at the beginning. But as Mr. Gill explains, that lower level of confidence went from low to moderate rapidly.

“It’s a cycle of continuous improvement. It’s only going to get better over time,” he added.

Leader Asset Management
City of Canning

Strategic Asset Management is absolutely important for local government. You're starting to understand what your asset’s needs are going to be.

The Outcome

By implementing SAM, the City of Canning was able to have increased clarity across their assets, which allowed them to more effectively plan for the long term.

In fact, with the help of SAM the City of Canning was able to identify an issue with their current levels of spending, which if continued at the current rate, would have caused a budget shortfall in the future.

“It was important for the executive team to understand that if we pursued investing at current levels, over the long-term we were going to have a shortfall. We were able to present work programs around it and show just what impact it was going to have on our service levels and the servicing risk tradeoffs. That helped us provide support and justification to scaling back or prioritising a greater need in that investment.”

Spotlight

Understanding the industry context and the challenges faced by our customers, SAM has been developed and designed to provide an evidence-based decision-making capability to optimise investments across the asset base and help deliver better service outcomes. It allows our customers to balance investment against risk and service needs ensuring the targeted use of funding to achieve the best possible outcome.

The solution is comprised of three core functions – prediction modelling and optimisation, advanced modelling, and asset valuations, when combined provide muti-scenario renewal and replacement planning and modelling, and condition-based asset revaluation and depreciation calculation that, when finalised will automatically post to the General Ledger.

About City of Canning

The City of Canning is located in Perth’s south-eastern suburbs, about 10 kilometres from the Perth CBD, and services more than 99,000 residents across 16 suburbs.

City of Canning website

Publish date

09 Mar 2023

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