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Product News: Asset
Management Planning and Work Orders
By Mike Dibble
One of our larger clients engaged us to replace
their in-house Sign Management System by enhancing
PubWorks. At another company they may
have fulfilled the task and come out with a new Sign
Management module. And then with a few tweaks, they
would than be offering a Street Light module. A few
more tweaks and voila! a Culverts module.
But we are not those other companies and we thought
long and hard about what was at the core of this
Sign Management System. Thinking in terms of the
rhetorical question: “What's the difference between
a sign and a culvert?” I thought, “Let’s design
something that will work for signs, culverts,
sidewalks and any other type of asset!”
At its core, an Asset Management System must be able
to:
1. Plan ahead for a task to be performed.
2. Have a task repeat, sometimes at specific
intervals (e.g. monthly, yearly, etc.).
3. Have specific, identifiable results based on the
performance of a task.
4. Generate a next-task-to-perform based on the
results recorded from a prior task.
All of these capabilities can be found in expensive
work-flow systems and products. But we wanted to fit
our enhancements seamlessly into PubWorks
consistent with the simplicity and
straight-forwardness to which our customers have
grown accustomed. Once you see the new Asset
Management Planning tool, we think you will agree:
It’s simple, it handles the work-flows you currently
follow and it’s fast and easy to use!
Another feature we added to support Asset Management
Planning is a Work Orders module. Once you use Asset
Management Planning to help identify the fact there
are 25 signs on Central Avenue to be inspected; now
you can grab those 25 inspection tasks and put them
into one work order. This work order can then be
printed and assigned to an employee or crew.
When the work order comes back, with just a few
keystrokes (or mouse clicks) you can complete the
work order and PubWorks will create,
for each of the 25 signs, a work history of when the
sign was inspected, by whom, the results of the
inspection and when it needs to be inspected next.
With one extra keystroke during the work order
completion entry, you can indicate that the sign
(#25-AB-3214, at mile post 0.214, 12 feet to the
left of the centerline), was inspected and found
riddled with bullet holes. The extra keystroke will
automatically schedule a Sign Fabrication task
(thanks to the work-flow you set up in the Asset
Management Planning tool).
We cannot stress enough that what you can do for
signs, you can do for culverts or street lights or
any asset you manage. We provide the framework…you
decide what assets need to be worked-on, what tasks
need to be performed, how often those task need to
be performed, what result types you want reported,
and what next task needs to be performed based on
any reported result.
Our Asset Management Planning and Work Orders
modules are scheduled to be released in late July
2006. For more information please contact
Pete
Anzalone (970) 923-0380.
Table of Contents Volume 2, Edition 2
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