By: Sara Carter, Regional Marketing Director, Brightly Software, a Siemens company

For UK councils, managing public assets isn’t just about upkeep; it involves building resilient communities, and nurturing trust and transparency between them and their residents. With thousands of public assets to manage – including highways assets like carriageways, footways, signs, traffic signals and streetlights – achieving efficient and insightful asset management is a complex but crucial undertaking. Brightly offers digital solutions that are significantly improving how local governments manage their assets – with shrinking budgets, too – while increasing productivity and enhancing public services.

The journey to smart asset management: Foundational, Insightful, Smart

Brightly’s approach to asset management is structured around three key stages: Foundational, Insightful and Smart. This three-stage journey ensures that councils can leverage their existing data to make informed, forward-looking decisions.

We’ve already focused on Foundational in a previous column, so here, we’ll highlight the Insightful and Smart stages.

Insightful: Leveraging the power of data-driven decisions

By looking at assets’ complete maintenance history, rather than just individual work orders, councils can get a greater understanding of their deterioration. Historical data can help councils to make data-backed decisions about whether repairs or replacements are needed – and when.

Insightful asset management empowers local governments to:

• Better manage their budgets: Get an understanding of when assets will require different levels of maintenance based on their age and condition, making capital planning more accurate. This can help them to predict when assets will no longer be financially or operationally viable to maintain, thereby reducing unnecessary downtime and impacts to services for their communities.
• Boost productivity: Compare maintenance requests with assigned personnels’ workload, identify resource gaps and make better-informed decisions on staffing and job logistics.
• Identify upcoming maintenance: Spot underlying problems that might otherwise go undetected, putting them in a good position to proactively intervene.
• Build business cases: Use data to support decisions for repairs.

Commenting on how Brightly’s Confirm solution provides insights to facilitate and optimise the management of her council’s streetlights, Ruth Hughes, Team Manager at Leicestershire County Council, says: “We use the asset data to inform us of the life cycle of a street light. So, because we’ve got our winter maintenance routes in Confirm, we know which roads are gritted and salt can affect street light life. We use that information to tie things together.”

Smart: Predict the future with asset investment planning

This stage leverages insights to accurately model the lifecycle of assets and predict where maintenance is required, in advance. This allows councils to act beyond reactive problem-solving, instead moving towards proactive, strategic planning and maintenance.

Smart asset management enables councils to:

• Optimise capital planning: Use assets’ condition, usage and maintenance history – rather than just their age – to evaluate if replacements are required, ensuring more efficient allocation of taxpayers’ funds.
• Predict needs: By leveraging data, councils are in a better position to anticipate future requirements and ensure long-term financial investments.
• Monitor asset performance: Routinely monitor assets with integrated IoT devices for real-time updates and data on assets’ condition and performance.
• Support sustainability: Identify opportunities to reduce impact, integrate climate-friendly practices into the community and work towards Net Zero goals.

By embracing an Insightful and Smart approach to asset management, UK councils can ensure their public assets deliver long-term value, while keeping communities running smoothly and efficiently for years to come.

To learn more about how Brightly can help your local council, visit: brightlysoftware.com/en-gb/industries/government

(Pics: Brightly)