WHY IS ASSET MAINTENANCE IMPORTANT IN SOUTH AFRICA

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Maintenance is a crucial component of successful Infrastructure Asset Management and includes activities that keep the system in operating condition. Well-maintained infrastructure serves consumer needs and underpins economic production, employment, taxes and rates.

Poor maintenance of public infrastructure:


South Africa, like the rest of Africa, needs to focus on the construction of new infrastructure to satisfy demand in the context of rapid urbanisation. Effective maintenance management, however, remains integral in order for the National Development Plan to achieve its goals by 2030.

In July 2017, the City of Tshwane will launch the IMQS Maintenance Management module. This software package will support existing IMQS products – e.g. Asset Register, Project Control System and IMQS Water package - at this Category A metropolitan municipality to achieve comprehensive Infrastructure Asset Management capabilities.

MAINTENANCE CHALLENGES AT THE CITY OF TSHWANE

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City of Tshwane (CoT) is the single largest metropolitan municipality in South Africa with a population of 3 275 152 in 2016. The Gauteng municipality extends services to around 1 136 877 households of which:

77.2% have flush toilets connected to sewerage;

79.4% have weekly refuse removal;

62.1% have piped water inside their dwellings and

91.8% have electricity for lighting.

IMQS Maintenance Management has been developed as an end-to-end web-based GIS-centric tool to assist municipalities in managing their preventative and reactive maintenance activities. This solution integrates, automates and unifies all maintenance-related data sources, processes, and reporting. Users gain an informed and interactive view of their entire infrastructure asset landscape along with early warning signs of asset failure and potential material shortages based on available stock-levels.

IMQS has worked closely with CoT to address the following challenges:

6 MODULES TO OVERCOME MAINTENANCE CHALLENGES

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The Maintenance Management software package consists of the following 6 modules that enable CoT to overcome current maintenance challenges:

1. INCIDENT LOGGER

If a CoT citizen spots an incident, such as a burst water pipe on a stand or street in the municipal bounds, the citizen should be able to alert the municipal call centre where the incident is logged and action is taken accordingly.

Incident Logger makes this process efficient and transparent by automating broader processes and centralising all information, that is moreover linked geographically. When incidents are logged via the call centre, the appropriate municipal authorities are able to view the status and authorisation history of outgoing work-orders, as well as what labour has been assigned to the job.

Incident Logger also allows the CoT to effortlessly print job cards as well as link an incident to an existing asset component in the geographically referenced IMQS system. Incident Logger is therefore an intricate component in the municipal system that empowers citizens to play an active role in their communities and ensure that transparent and good governance practices are met.

2. PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE

Empowered by the Maintenance Management package, CoT is able to proactively schedule and specify maintenance at repeat intervals according to asset components and in relation to procedures and tasks that need to be performed. CoT is able to query asset, or asset-component status, identify and maintain critical functions before asset failure, as well as identify asset faults that could lead to the loss of critical functions. In the case of water demand management, for example, Maintenance Management and the IMQS Water software package integrate in order for the municipality to extract comprehensive and complex reports that will inform managers about problem areas, and thus further feed the preventative maintenance system.

3. RESOURCE MANAGER

A key need that the Maintenance Management package fulfils is that of financial transparency and accountability on the Local Government level. The software seamlessly integrates with CoT’s SAP ERP system, allowing CoT to account for all resources utilized within the Maintenance Management system expended to: 1) maintain employee, fleet, material and equipment lists and 2) tariffs and standard-time programmes for their employees.

[View Johannesburg Water SAP Integration Case Study]

4. TIME & COST

The Time and Cost module provides municipal managers with the ability to automate time sheets as well as calculate overtime and cost for all skilled and unskilled labourers. Overtime and short-time reports can then be exported to CoT’s Financial SAP ERP to ensure payroll is updated accordingly. The module therefore bolsters good governance, efficiency and transparency and combats unnecessary expenditure.

5. METER MAINTENANCE

The Meter Maintenance module provides municipal managers with an up-to-date, spatial view of all water-connection and meter-maintenance activity history in CoT’s municipal boundaries. An interested party is able to query information, leveraged from the IMQS Water Demand Management module, related to meters on specific stands, or groups of stands, and schedule maintenance according to the best information at hand. The module, moreover, enables a municipal manager to generate detailed reports offering insight into previous or on-going work.

6. REPORTING

Reporting is integrated directly into the system and allows users to generate a wide range of reports including Trend Analysis, Full Detail and Performance reports relating to all maintenance activities and costs. Payment Certificates for all Contract work undertaken can effortlessly be generated and printed.

As an integrated and spatially enabled solution for Incident Reporting [View Video], IMQS Maintenance Management helps municipalities overcome challenges and extract the most value they can get from each asset they maintain.

For more information on how other municipalities are using IMQS Maintenance Management, read our blogs on Rustenburg or Lesedi, or contact us directly to talk about the challenges you are facing.