Optimising asset management with Asset Vision

How Asset Vision’s digital solutions are helping local councils streamline asset management and maintenance.

Since its launch in 2010, Australian-owned technology company Asset Vision has offered smart, streamlined solutions for asset management for local governments, road owners, and civil construction companies.

Co-Founder and CEO Damian Smith first developed the platform with a focus on road networks, which led to early contracts for the Victorian Department of Transport (DoT), and Transport for NSW (TfNSW).

These contracts introduced the platform to a wide range of local councils, including: Moyne Shire Council, Horsham Rural City Council, Mildura City Council, Goulburn Mulwaree Council, West Wimmera Council Hindmarsh Shire Council and City of Newcastle. Many of these councils in turn began to see the value of the platform for managing related assets such as bridges, tunnels, drainage systems, open space infrastructure and facilities.

In early 2022, Shire of East Pilbara in Western Australia – Australia’s largest local government area – chose Asset Vision for an integrated asset management solution after a competitive tender process.

Asset Vision’s Phil Elms, Client Delivery Manager for the project, says the council was seeking a centralised, adaptable solution to manage the financial planning and maintenance of its vast network of assets across the region’s 372,571 square kilometres.

“They were looking for a system to take them into the future,” Elms says. “One with the flexibility to support new capabilities as they migrate their people and processes into it.”

Elms says East Pilbara’s Asset Vision system currently monitors about 44 different asset types – a number he expects will grow as more data is captured.

“It’s used for everything from an airport, through to water treatment plants, buildings, rentals, as well as roads and open space infrastructure,” he says. “It’s one of the biggest cross-sections of asset types that we’ve seen a client use Asset Vision for.”

More data, less hassle

Asset Vision’s mission is to offer a centralised asset management platform with a focus on flexibility and ease of use.

Once populated with data, the system is accessible on smart devices through the dedicated Asset Vision app, through which assets can be monitored, photos uploaded, jobs tracked, and maintenance scheduled.

Smith says the key is bringing asset owners and service providers onto the same platform.

“From the very beginning, we set out to build a modern and centralised asset and maintenance management platform that could be easily used by both asset owners and their contractors,” he says.

“It had never been done before. These organisations work together on a daily basis in the real world, so it made perfect sense to connect them to each other in the digital world.

“With all parties connected to the same system, Asset Vision provides a frictionless environment for everyone to work together efficiently and transparently.”

Evolving partnerships

Moyne Shire in southwestern regional Victoria has used Asset Vision in some form since 2013.

Unlike the recent all-at-once implementation for East Pilbara, Moyne Shire’s integration of Asset Vision has evolved gradually over several years.

Marius Dragan, Asset Vision’s Client Manager for the Moyne Shire project, says the council initially came on board as part of Asset Vision’s contract with the DoT, which required the shire team to use the system for contract maintenance work on DoT-owned road assets that ran through the area.

“I think they were impressed with the functionality that Asset Vision provided,” Dragan says. “After a few years, when it came time to modernise their own system for council-owned road assets, they decided Asset Vision was the right tool for them.”

According to Moyne Shire’s Leah Johnston, Manager Works and Engineering, the council had been seeking a digital solution to replace an ageing paper-based system.

“We’d researched a range of systems, but we had staff who were familiar with Asset Vision from our contract with the DoT,” Johnston says. “There was some synergy there that just made sense for us to implement it for our own road inspections and management.”

Stephen Arundell, Moyne Shire Infrastructure Surveillance Officer, says the system has predominantly been used for roads and footpaths, but that looks set to change.

“Through using it for roads, we’ve seen the potential for how else Asset Vision can be used,” he says. “We’re currently looking at adding trees and playgrounds into the database, and potentially public toilets and street furniture too.”

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Arundell says he regularly challenges Asset Vision to adapt and tweak the system, and has seen major quality-of-life improvements implemented since he started using it.

“I might have a route of 50 roads that I need to inspect in a day, and they used to just pop up in a list,” Arundell says. “I’d have to get a physical map out, and manually plan the most efficient route.

“Now, Asset Vision can display those jobs highlighted on a map. I can see on my phone exactly which sections of which roads need to be inspected that day. A lot of little developments like this have made a huge difference to the efficiency of my inspections.”

Dragan says Asset Vision’s flexibility and adaptability enables solutions to be tailored to a client’s needs from the very beginning.

“We have a number of sessions with the client to understand their exact requirements, and the processes they typically follow in the delivery of their work,” he says. “We then go through a significant data analysis and design phase to understand the specific outcomes they want to achieve.

“They might not know exactly how the system would best address those outcomes, but they can say ‘this is what we want it to do’. We’ll take that on board and recommend the best system setup for them.”

This will sometimes require the Asset Vision team to build additional functionality into the tool to help a client achieve a particular outcome in a specific way.

“Sometimes we’ll adapt to suit them, or they’ll adapt to a process that we recommend. That level of flexibility is quite important,” Dragan says.

Local values

One point of pride for the Asset Vision team is the company’s local roots. Collectively, the team brings together decades of experience from local government, and the roads and infrastructure sectors.

“We’re Australian grown and Australian owned,” Smith says. “We’ve had a lot of exposure to how local businesses are run, and what’s required from both local service providers and asset owners.

“We have our own ideas and product roadmap, but we are ultimately guided by our clients’ needs and wants. The breadth of functionality available in Asset Vision today is a result of more than a decade of listening and adapting and overcoming challenges that are thrown our way.”

Smith says the Asset Vision team understands the range of challenges specific to Australia – from its sheer size to major weather events.

Last year Moyne Shire, like so many regions across Australia, had to deal with unprecedented flooding that put stress on roads, the council, and the community.

Arundell says using Asset Vision has enabled his team to respond more quickly and efficiently to such situations, and to be more prepared in the future.

“I’ve created specifications within the system to help us deal with flood events,” he says.

“We can capture photos, along with dates and timestamps of specific issues – even if it’s just water over the road – then we’ve got that information on record which we can later use to address the problem.”

Streamlining communication

“One of the biggest benefits of Asset Vision is bringing everyone onto one platform,” Elms says. “You’re not trying to use different tools and emails to exchange information, where someone could forget to update data in one of the systems.

“You just get a single, uninterrupted view of everything in one location. And that means you can focus on the outcome, rather than all the administrative boxes you need to tick along the way.”

Elms says this also requires an end-user experience that’s as intuitive as possible, and as accessible as possible for the least ‘tech-savvy’ member of the team.

Moyne Shire’s Stephen Arundell can attest to this.

“We have one guy on the team who didn’t have a mobile phone – never even used one,” Arundell says. “Now, he’s got a smartphone, he does all his pre-start inspections on there, and it hasn’t been an issue for him.”

Always building

For Co-Founder and CEO Damian Smith, the continued growth and evolution of the Asset Vision platform will remain a key focus for the company.

“Fundamentally, the day-to-day role of a road or asset inspector hasn’t changed much since Asset Vision began its journey – there’s just a lot more technology available that we can use to make their job safer and more efficient,” he says.

“The challenge is applying the technology in the right way, and our long-standing team plays a critical role in pushing these boundaries. Innovation and thinking outside the box is where Asset Vision started, and we’re not slowing down now.”

This article was originally published in the February edition of our magazine. To read the magazine, click here.