White paper

Location Intelligence
Asset Management

Taking infrastructure
asset management
to the next level.
Enhance your mobility, scheduling and citizen engagement capabilities

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In todays economic climate, municipal

and regional governments are under
more pressure than ever to deliver
first-rate services while effectively
maintaining and managing the
critical, increasingly complex asset
infrastructures that urban environments
require. On one hand, they are
responsible for strategically allocating
public funds in an environment where
scrutinyfrom both traditional and
online sourcesis greater and more
intense than ever. On the other, even
as funding shrinks and budgets tighten,
government entities are expected to do
more with lessthat is, to somehow
improve services while lowering costs.
Successfully executing this balancing
act while managing a constantly aging
asset portfolio including:
Roads and highways
Bridges and structures
Street lighting and signage
Street furniture
Property and buildings
Drainage and storm water
Parks and green spaces
All of these represent challenges that
asset management professionals face
on a daily basis.

Taking infrastructure asset management to the next level.

A Pitney Bowes white paper

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The mandate to manage, repair and install assets is

becoming more complex. Many organizations simply dont
have the technological capabilities to execute key tasks
in the most timely, cost-effective, efficient manner, given
the tight budgets and timeframes they routinely face.
Moreover, the ability to directly engage the publicboth
through quick response to issues and by providing prompt,
accessible updates on resultsis broadly lacking.
Most municipalities could, however, realize across-theboard cost reductions and productivity improvements,
as well as enhance public involvement in the asset
management process, by enhancing their technological
asset management capabilities in the areas of mobility,
scheduling and citizen engagement.
Whether youre a city or county public works director,
a streets manager, an IT manager responsible for asset
management software or a contractor providing asset
maintenance services, having strong capabilities in these
three areas is critical to developing and sustaining a
leading-edge public infrastructure asset management
program. Its a must have in meeting the challenges that
todays budgetary environment poses.

Mobility: Information must move with

your workforce.
There are some specific challenges public entities
face in managing key assets that a mobile solution
readily addresses.

Paper documentation and manual processes often fail.

Many government agencies continue to work on physically
structured, paper-based systems. They rely on back-end
data that is printed out by an administrator, who physically
transmits it to a foreman or supervisor, who then gives it to
a field crew. As they fulfill their work order, the field crew
writes on the paper, noting important changes and issues,
then sends it back to administration at the end of the day
to be manually entered back into the system. The potential
problems are obvious. There may be clarity issuesdue
to scribbled information, torn paper, missing sheetsthat
result in incorrect system input. Moreover, the time and
effort spent transferring electronic information to paperbased information and back againthe redundant work
and likelihood of introducing new errorscan become an
accuracy nightmare and a productivity sinkhole.

Improve productivity and efficiency in the field.

Beyond the time wasted in the back office and along the
information chain, the productivity of field teams also takes
a hit when mobile capabilities are weak, for example, if a
crew already on site has to keep returning to the office
to pick up the next job. Crews need to be out in the field
as much of the day as possible to maximize their work
effort, so receiving high-priority work via a mobile device is
critical. It can greatly reduce the time between identifying
an issue at the office and resolving it in the field.

By adopting a mobile work platform,

Nottingham city councils highways
department has achieved field
efficiency savings of 40% and back
office efficiency savings of 60%.
Despite these potential gains, many public entities arent
using mobile technology at all, at least not as a regular
component of field work. Those that are often have very
limited capabilities. The fact is, an effective, properly
designed mobile solution delivers a number of key
capabilities, including:
Letting users manage inspections.
Surveys and work crew activities on site.
View live task lists.
Update asset locations.
Conditions and attributes.
Respond to inquiries.
More quickly complete maintenance activities and
inspections directly from the field.
With real-time, two-way communication enabled between
asset owner and field workforce, municipalities can:
Manage multiple project workflows
Optimize tasks
Reduce errors
Better capture onsite information
Use precious municipal resources more efficiently
Maintain accountability at all levels.
Ideally, a mobile solution will have both online and offline
functionality. Once workers have downloaded required
information and instructions, they can continue to work
offline in areas without network connectivity.

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Benefits of mobile asset management.

Connect field workers and assets in real-time.
Allow faster, more informed decision making with up-todate information on assets and maintenance activities.
Let inspectors, surveyors and work crews spend more
time in the field and less time in the office.
Directly receive and respond to customer issues and
inquiries on your mobile device.
Undertake surveys of existing assets and create new
assets while in the field.
Send scheduled jobs, track status and costs and create
work history.
Undertake on-site inspections of third-party work to
ensure regulatory compliance.

Scheduling: Be in time, on time at the

right time.
Scheduling is another area where municipalities face
a number of challenges. As with mobility (and in some
ways scheduling is an extension of mobility), there are
basic issues around paper and manual processes as well
as managing productivity and efficiency. An enormous
amount of time is spent identifying task locations, as each
task is itemized on a work order and grouped together for
individual crews to work in specific areas. With an effective
scheduling software solution in place, every current
task will be listed and location-based technology will be
integrated. That means that a work group in one location
can be automatically sent to others nearby and to jobs
requiring equipment and skills they already have on board.

Aberdeenshire council reports that, since

upgrading their scheduling software, the
percentage of public workers instructions
completed within a specified timescale
rose to 89.5%. This representing a 5.5%
improvement over the previous two years.

Lincolnshire county council governs

a rural area where mobile signals can
be poor. That creates a challenge for
highways contractors to receive and act
on critical job information. However, with
an advanced mobile solution implemented,
information is cached and transmitted
as soon as a mobile signal becomes
available. That significantly improved
workers ability to do more on the move.

Taking infrastructure asset management to the next level.

This lets crews operate autonomously. Now, they can

receive orders and tasks via an automated scheduling
process that requires minimal direct contact with the
foreman. Crews can plan and prioritize activities more
effectively while also reacting more dynamically to
incidents or emergencies. Its critical to be able to
automatically combine multiple levels of data intelligence
in your scheduling processincluding work crew
location, date restrictions, task requirements and route
optimizationin order to effectively manage, improve and
optimize resource management.

A Pitney Bowes white paper

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Benefits of scheduling software

Enable central management of your work crews in
real time.
Ensure work crews are in the right place at the right time
to drive efficiency.
Reduce travel time via route optimization.
Address energy and resource conservation challenges.
Improve service levels and meet key performance
indicators (KPIs).
Avoid duplicate and missed work orders that
increase costs.
Proactively manage KPIs with alerts, dashboards and
automated process management.

Citizen engagement: Improve reporting

accuracy and accountability.
While improved mobility and scheduling helps
municipalities raise the quality of asset management
activities for both the central office and field crew, the
critical role of the public itself must also be addressed.
For many government entities, the most challenging
issue of all can be the disconnect between citizens, the
issues they report as well as the resolutions that are
ultimately implemented.
Most local governments have some kind of process in place
to update citizensfor example, a return email or phone
callbut these are often unreliable. That results in a citizen
not getting a response or having to make more calls to
find out exactly whats been done. To keep the public up
to date and ensure issues dont fall through the cracks,
your reporting system should be fully and automatically
integrated with work order management and scheduling.
This integration streamlines the entire citizen inquiry
process by instantly recording customer inquiries directly
against assets. Those inquiries are then immediately
converted into inspection activities. Once the inspection or
resulting work has been completed, the results are made
available in an appropriate format, including on citizenfacing, geospatially enabled websites, via a smart-phone
apps or even through social media.

By automating their citizen engagement

process, Medway Council says they
can now refocus on what really
mattersproviding the best possible
service to the people of Medway.
Now, when citizens call or use the
website to report service issues, the
Council receives accurate, up-to-date
information and can easily inform citizens
about when repairs are scheduled.
Reporting accuracy is also an important factor in the
citizen engagement equation. When someone reports an
issue, the specific location of that issue is often unclear
in the resulting report information. The municipality may
understand that theres a pothole somewhere, perhaps
near a certain intersection, but they dont have the precise
data to easily find it. Plus, in manual reporting processes
where someone has to transcribe information, you again
get scribbles, inaccuracies and newly introduced errors. Add
in a poor response mechanism and you have a system that
doesnt suit the needs of the city or the citizen.
An effective citizen engagement solution should be directly
integrated with information being input through both
mobile and scheduling technologies. Ideally, all information
should be part of a multi-stream database contained in
an overarching public infrastructure asset management
platform. With these data sources coalescing into one
central source of truth, the accuracy and reliability of
citizen reports and updates are increased, the frequency
of lost reports is reduced and municipal accountability to
the public is improved. When executed correctly, citizens
should be able to view the status of existing issues on a
geospatial online map, as well as record new enquiries by
either asset or location.

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Benefits of enabling citizen engagement

Enhance community engagement and involvement.
Strengthen information flow and collaborative services.
Allow your work crews to receive and act on inquiries
while in the field.
Keep citizens up to date with reliable,
accurate information.
Improve public sector accountability.
Integrate citizen reports and updates with all information
in the asset management system.

Do more with less.

Streamlining asset management processes
to deliver broad cost savings is a key
mandate of local governments.
Theres no question that governments at all levels are
being asked to do more with less. Investing in public
infrastructure asset management technology is certainly
one way to help municipal and county governments
accomplish that goal. They can become more efficient,
more productive and more responsive without spending
more money or increasing staff. In many cases, savings will
be realized that can be reinvested in asset management or
reallocated as needed.

Do more

With less

Manage more asset types.

Effective mobile working.
Automate repetitive tasks.
Streamline workflows.
Remove process waste.
Right time on the right task
Meet legislative
requirements

Optimize budget spend

Maximize staff efficiencies
Reduce admin overheads
Enterprise economies
of scale
Easy Access to KPIs
Field service stays in
the field
Simply manage citizen and
contractor relationships

Taking infrastructure asset management to the next level.

Confirm EAM software from PitneyBowes

is a public infrastructure asset management
solution. Confirm EAM is designed to
help you do more with less. Its simple
to implement which is critical for
municipalities. Public works directors and
asset managers understand the value of
these solutions, but many worry about
implementation impacts and handling
new support requirements. Confirm
EAM can handle this for you with a
range of practical asset management
benefits. This solution can be packaged,
configured and cloud-enabled so you
can concentrate on realizing the benefits
most important to you right away.
Taken together, improving mobility, scheduling and
citizen engagement allows your public infrastructure asset
management solution to operate at maximum efficiency.
Other city-level benefits include:
Building and preserving reputation.
Encouraging community investment.
Protecting against litigation.
Promoting customer engagement.
Improving customer service.
Supporting a safer, cleaner community.

Implementing a more robust centralized

highway inspection system based on
Confirm EAM software has allowed
Medway council to more accurately
and effectively defend against
insurance claims, reducing the amount
of claims paid out by over 50%.

A Pitney Bowes white paper

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Eliminate barriers by letting go of your legacy.

Despite the fact that public infrastructure asset
management technology provides numerous benefits and
is easy to learn, use and implement, many municipalities
remain worried that uptake will be problematic. Theres no
question that some level of organizational culture change
may need to take place, but the degree of change required
may also be overestimated by reluctant adopters.
The fact is, theres a growing need to replace legacy
business applications with new, intuitive, easy-to-use mobile
software for modern devices. Though most cities have some
kind of asset management program in place, they stick
with rigid, inadequate legacy systems because of transition
concerns. With smartphones now ubiquitous, and with new
asset management solutions being designed to work on
smart platformsmost workers will be able to pick up and
use the relevant software with no advanced technical savvy
and minimal training.

There really is no legitimate barrier to adopting public

infrastructure asset management technology. When
you consider the clear advantages enhanced mobility,
scheduling and citizen engagement can deliver, forwardthinking municipalities will be taking the next step sooner
than later.
To experience the many advantages a leading-edge public
infrastructure asset management software solution can
provide or to upgrade your existing capabilities, contact
us at info.confirmassets@pb.com or 800 327 8627 to
schedule a free consultation.

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For more information,

visit us online: pitneybowes.com
Pitney Bowes, the Corporate logo, and Confirm are trademarks of Pitney Bowes Inc. or a subsidiary.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
2015 Pitney Bowes Inc. All rights reserved.

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