ABOUT HORNSBY SHIRE COUNCIL
Hornsby Shire Council is the local governing body for Hornsby Shire, situated on the Upper North Shore and Northern Suburbs of Sydney. It’s the largest local government council in the Greater Sydney Metropolitan region by total area, serving a population of around 140,000 and managing over 100,000 built assets.
Recent Challenges
Hornsby Shire Council (HSC) has always pioneered effective asset management, in line with its responsibility to develop a long-term vision for the Shire. HSC and AssetFuture have a longstanding partnership that has helped the council to implement a proper asset management framework, and to review and manage its diverse set of built assets from Community Centres, parks, Leisure Facilities and Libraries to Council Offices and the Rural Fire Service.
The COVID pandemic, with its lockdowns, has been extremely challenging for asset owning organisations like HSC. Remote working, lockdowns and staff shortages have all made it extremely difficult - even impossible - to make site visits for the purposes of collecting and maintaining asset data. Additionally, council amalgamations in recent years meant that certain sites no longer belonged to Hornsby, while new locations hadn’t been added to the register.
With asset data now being a few years old and not up-to-date, HSC faced challenges with planning reliable operational and capital programs to help guide informed strategic decisions.
““In recent years we have faced challenges around maintaining up-to-date asset data, resource-availability and engagement around our Asset Management strategies. This resulted in reporting inefficiencies and high levels of reactive OpEx and CapEx activities. To realise our vision of strategic, proactive asset management, delivering long-term value to our residents, we needed to improve our data quality and also implement processes to ensure continued data collection and accuracy,””
The solution
As well as needing more reliable asset information, Hornsby Shire Council also realised it required ongoing support to continue improving their Asset Management strategies. With several buildings and public park infrastructure undergoing new builds and refurbishments, staff were already stretched and HSC needed extra assistance to ensure their asset data is current and reliable.
HSC decided to partner with AssetFuture for a Data Improvement Engagement to improve their asset data quality. This involved AssetFuture experts working on-site at the Council, outlining opportunities for data accuracy and guiding the council team with the necessary steps to bring it up to date.
"The goal was to ensure Hornsby Shire Council’s asset data meets their Asset Management planning and reporting requirements. HSC had a system in place, but it wasn’t utilised to its full capacity. As part of the data improvement initiatives, both teams worked on optimising the asset data to ensure their asset data is accurate to enable planning of capital works and operational programs" explains Jack Torode, Asset Future.
Both HSC and AssetFuture teams collaborated to restructure and improve the existing asset data set to enable informed decision making for HSC asset portfolio.
The results
Having high quality data has transformed Hornsby Shire Council’s capabilities when it comes to Asset Management. Confidence and trust around Asset Lifecycle Intelligence and asset data has increased, as well as technology adoption by end users. Overall maturity around Asset Management is greatly improved, which has helped streamline processes around budgeting and funding approval.
"Thanks to our collaboration with AssetFuture, we now have an excellent grasp on our data and assets and can take a much more strategic, proactive approach to management. Reporting processes are much more efficient, and it’s much easier to achieve funding requests with the reliable, accurate data we now have," Louise Briske says.
"Overall we’re enjoying a much stronger relationship with AssetFuture and are confident that with the improved data quality and business processes, we can continue to keep our data accurate and up to date. This is vital for compliance as well as ongoing risk mitigation. We now have more confidence across our asset portfolio and can ensure that asset lifecycle is optimised and we get the best value from our assets for the community."
Having optimised the existing asset data, HSC and AssetFuture are now working together to expand the lifecycle forecasting capabilities across other departments and asset classes.
HIGHLIGHTS
Higher confidence and trust around Asset Lifecycle Intelligence and asset data as a result of data improvements
More efficient reporting, including funding request processes
Increased technology adoption by end-users
Improved maturity around Asset Management with a more proactive approach