Hannah Winstanley, general manager of Brightly, explains how a flexible data platform can provide a clear picture of physical assets and their influence on the local environment
Local authorities’ physical assets – such as sensors, CCTV, street furniture and lighting – are central features in their efforts to create smart places and communities.
They perform functions that are crucial to the successful running and sustainability of urban and rural environments, and produce a wealth of data that can be used to support operations and strategic planning.
The smart management of that data can provide a ‘golden thread’ in the use of the assets. A council’s asset register provides a foundation for this, and a robust yet flexible data platform with the capacity to manage a wide range of physical assets is an important tool in building smart places.
Brightly’s Confirm enterprise asset management software makes it possible to pull together data from a range of sources to support decision making – automated or by humans – to track and improve the performance of physical assets, creating more efficient workflows, streamlining operations and supporting proactive asset lifecycle management.
Combining real and digital
It provides a toolbox that makes it possible to combine the real and digital worlds with a representation of physical assets and integrations – using industry standard APIs – with a wide range of technology partners to support the smarter use of assets into the long term.
This can run the golden thread through an asset management journey. It works with a dependable asset register to consolidate information. This can support the scheduling of maintenance and provide data for analysis to identify where action is needed and investment should be targeted. It concludes with the automated and proactive actions that underpin smart places.
The platform can pull in data from any type of IoT sensors – measuring features such as rainfall, drainage, traffic levels, air quality – to provide dashboards and spatial views of physical assets and the surrounding environments. It can be programmed to provide alerts and automate workflows for a more proactive approach to managing the assets.
It can also overlay data from different types of assets to show their interdependencies. For example, Hammersmith and Fulham Council uses Confirm to monitor silt levels, temperatures and rainfall around drainage points so it can anticipate possible floods and take preventative action to ensure the drains are clear.
Bristol applications
Bristol City Council uses the platform as a data pool in several ways. Its highway maintenance and assets team manager, Nick Pates, has described how it provides visibility of assets including streetlights, gullies, bus stops, grit bins and clean air zone sensors and has supported several important projects.
These include: an audit of all the CCTV cameras in the city, not just those owned by the council, giving it a clear view of their location and who is responsible for them; management of its parks, taking in inspections and equipment in the playgrounds; an audit of the city’s bridges to see which are in need of renewal; and the management of its BNET ducting and fibre communications network, including the renting out to other users.
A recent project has dealt with the management of Bristol’s approximately 45,000 gullies. The council has recently switched from cyclical cleaning to a reliance on individual inspections that identify those which need a clean, with Confirm making it possible to overlay data on flood risk with silt levels with complaints to target the cleaning and necessary renewals.
It has also used Confirm in managing fault detections in the city’s street lighting, making it possible to move away from manual night scouting and reducing the number of complaints. This has been accompanied by recording energy usage by the new LED lights, integrating with the Schréder smart lighting system to combine this with data on installation dates, warranties and inspections to identify energy performance and savings.
Road defects
There has been an integration with the Gaist SafetyView system for collecting inspection data on defects in the road network. Confirm takes in high definition imagery of the roads which is submitted to an AI process to identify critical defects, followed by an automated process of allocating the job to a contractor and sending the images and a job pack.
Pates said one of the benefits has been the ability to spot defects earlier before they become highly serious and categorise them so they are covered by capital rather than revenue spending. This has helped in enabling the council to plan its works better and maintain the state of the road network, and provided good quality evidence for either defending or settling any claims against it.
Another integration has been with the fixmystreet app, with reports of problems being forwarded to Confirm, triaged and sent to appropriate team, then to a contractor who reports back when the job has been done. Pates said this generally works well and provides highways and asset management with a clear view of where to target resources, as well as providing a good service to councillors and the public.
A further benefit is in providing information for dealing with complaints and responding to freedom of information requests.
Net zero potential
He added that for the future the council is looking at bringing in other datasets and working with Brightly to understand carbon usage in its operations.
It is something that we see as having great potential, with Confirm having the capacity to provide data on the maintenance of physical assets – such as vehicles, equipment, machinery and waste – can affect carbon emissions in an area. There is scope to provide evidence for changing how things are done and the behaviour of teams and individuals in the effort to get to net zero.
All this shows the importance of harnessing an increasingly wide range of data, using a platform on which it can integrated to provide a clear picture and show the relationships between different types of assets and environmental factors. This is a priority issue in the development of smart places, one which can be addressed through finding out more about the capabilities of Confirm.
To find out more about how other councils are utilising smarter asset management please visit Brightly here
Catch up now with Brightly and Bristol City Council's presentation from Smart Places & Smart Communities 2024
