Asset Damage Prevention: A Series of Client Case Studies
John Lockton
PelicanCorp (AU) Pty Ltd
Abstract:
Learn how asset owners have implemented solutions to create internal efficiencies and have engaged with the excavation community to reduce asset damages and improve compliance. This session will provide an in-depth look into the challenges and some of the best damage prevention solutions the industry has to offer by way of a series of client case studies. PelicanCorp solutions cater to the needs of local government, utilities and contractors when it comes to protecting underground services. In this session you will learn how your organisation can ‘protect, permit, inspect and collate’ in relation to underground assets, improve visibility and protect assets; whilst saving time, resources and lives.
Keywords: Damage Prevention, Asset Protection, PelicanCorp
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Introduction
Damage to assets, and in particular to those underground, can have profound consequences on the asset owner, the community and individuals. Damages can cause costly third-party losses, and negative brand consequences, expensive outages and can seriously injure or even kill people. This paper analyses a series of case studies by travelling around Australia - discussing the problems, solutions and benefits for each.
PelicanCorp are an Australian organisation with a global footprint, with a strong presence in NewZealand, US/Canada, UK/Ireland and rest of Europe and Singapore. The primary focus for the business is around providing damage prevention solutions to local councils, utilities, locators, the contractors who are performing the excavation in the field and a whole host of stakeholder groups.
We have been doing this this for more than 20 years and a number of people in our organisation have been doing this for more than 40 years; so we have a huge amount of experience and have a diverse range of offerings for this market. The main aim of our solutions is to help people and organisations promote safety and promote damage prevention and introduce efficiencies around the processes associated with it.
We help asset owners, including Water, Gas, Electricity, Telcos, LGAs and the Locators and
Contractors building and maintaining the assets. Other asset owners include Airports, Universities, Ports and Rail/Light-Rail operators.
The types of assets being protected traditionally have included pipes and cables (water, gas, power, comms), but this has increased in recent years to include:
• Electric and Fibre for CCTV
• Street lighting and Traffic Lights
• Significant trees
• Parking Pods
• Reserves
• Aboriginal and Cultural Heritage areas
• Weed and contaminated lands
• Above ground assets … eg powerlines and road networks
• Tram tracks, roads, footpaths, driveways, railway lines, rail-crossings
• Planned infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet
• Screen against spatial and non-spatial criteria
Case Study 1 – Port Pirie Regional Council, SA
Let’s start our ‘case study journey’ around Australia at Port Pirie Regional Council in South Australia.
The Port Pirie region is 220km (2hrs) north of Adelaide with a mix of heavy industry and agriculture.
It has a population of approx. 17,000 and area of 1,700 sq km, Staff count of 100 (85.76FTE) and Opex of $24M and Capex of $10M.
Problem - Anybody digging dirt risks damaging underground assets, themselves, as well as other members of the public. 'Digging' can include major works but also simple tasks such as knocking star-pickets into the ground or replacing a letterbox pole. Over 50% of damages are from people not being prepared.
Solution - TicketAccess provides a solution which issues information to those digging - so that they are informed if there are assets in the vicinity of the dig site. In response to a DBYD Enquiry, referrals are sent to the appropriate asset owners and then TicketAccess does the heavy lifting (including screening, escalation and response back to the enquirer).
Benefits - Prior to automated response Port Pirie Regional Council manually processed responses which involved an internal cost of up to $5000 per year. They now have a fully automated managed service that has realised over 600 hours of time savings in the last 3 years… this has also allowed Council to further benefit from staff performing alternative works in this time saved.
Case Study 2 – Penrith City Council, NSW
Continuing our ‘case study journey’ around Australia … we are now at Penrith City Council in NSW (and also Port Pirie again). The City of Penrith is a local government area in the state of New South Wales, Australia. The seat of the city is located in Penrith, located about 50 kilometers (31 mi) west of Sydney's central business district. It occupies an area of around 400 sq.km and has a population of around 200,000 and growing considerably.
Problem – Anybody performing works within the road corridor should apply to the council or road authority for a permit. This is an action that the individual/company must actively undertake.
However, they often do not know, forget, or ignore the fact that they need to apply for the permit.
I have a few questions for Council or Road Authority personnel ...
• Do you always know when somebody is digging within your road corridors?
• Or do you notice works that you are unaware of when you drive past a work site?
• Or do you come across completed works that are not to your specification?
• Or do receive rate payer complaints and …and you don’t know who performed the works?
The challenges faced by Penrith City Council prior to their PermitAccess deployment were.
1. Lack of Visibility of works being done in the council area.
2. Council spending a lot of their road revenue budgets towards reinstatement works because of not knowing who had done the work.
3. Risk and liability to the council due to the fact they didn’t know of who and what types of works were being performed in their area and also affecting community safety.
Solution - For excavation works a permit application is initiated automatically, based upon the DBYD Enquiry, if the works are within the road corridor. The contractor does not need to remember to go to a particular site, fill in forms and then submit them….all whilst not forgetting to provide specific information. Instead, they are driven through a workflow so that all required information is provided. On the non-excavation side a similar process is followed but permits are initiated from a button on the Council website. The completed permit application for both excavation and non- excavation is processed by Council staff within the same PermitAccess portal.
Benefits (Part1) – The key benefits of the solution for Penrith City Council included:
1. Increased visibility of works being undertaken in Council’s Road Reserve by private contractors.
2. Reduction in the number of re-instatement works funded through Council’s maintenance budget.
3. Reduction in risk and liability to Council and improved community safety outcomes, and an improved customer experience through education of the process with enquirers.
Benefits (Part2) – Port Pirie Regional Council has also implemented this solution. Prior to a permitting system, Perth Regional Council processed 30-50 permits per year. They are now processing over 600 permits per year. This increased visibility has enabled Council to reduce their reinstatement costs since they can now request contractors to fix their substandard works, rather than their own road maintenance budget. Key Learnings included:
• Consider the workflow for PermitAccess and the associated process change.
• Consider the impact on contractors and work early in the project with them to prepare.
• The next step is to consider adding non-excavation/corridor permits.
Case Study 3 – City of Gold Coast, QLD
Continuing our ‘case study journey’ around Australia … we are now at City of Gold Coast in QLD. The City of Gold Coast is the local government area spanning the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia and surrounding areas. It has an area of 1334 sqkm, and with a population of 606,774, it is the second most populous local government area in Australia. Its council maintains a staff of over 2,500.
Problem - A pervasive problem remains in almost all Utilities/Councils - that being the use of paper in the construction as-built process. This paper-burdened legacy workflow is inefficient, wrought with data quality issues and results in massive mapping backlogs.
Solution - Recent advancement in mobile applications, cloud technology and sensors have made a user-friendly digital solution a reality. The Geolantis platform solves this difficult problem by
establishing a new vision for the Design>As-Built workflow that is streamlined and paperless - where paper job packets, paper as-builts and paper forms are replaced by a fully digital workflow.
Geolantis has developed a paperless digital as-built solution that fills the gap between design and GIS, guided by a mobile-first philosophy.
Benefits - The City of Gold Coast needed to assess the condition of approx. 35,000 fire hydrants.
They needed to recapture all the hydrant locations since the locations were not correct – the
positions had been collected using low precision devices, or simply were not known. With Geolantis, they were able import from their existing geospatial database from an existing system. They made the problem manageable by dividing up the grid and building an integrated project timeline. They could then allocate jobs to field crew and view real time status of the project. They re-captured any incorrect GIS position data using terrestrial total stations, added missing hydrants (890 in total) and then uploaded the results into the maser GIS system.
Case Study 4 – Western Power, WA
Continuing our ‘case study journey’ around Australia … we now are in WA. Western Power is a WA State Government owned corporation responsible for building, maintaining, and operating an electricity network that connects 2.3 million customers in the SW corner of WA, including Perth and reaching as far as Geraldton (N), Albany (S) and Kalgoorlie (E)… a service area of approx. 255,000
sq.km including over 100,000 km of network, 800,000 poles and towers and 150 transmission substations.
Problem - Western Power were experiencing the burden of a heavy administrative workload due to the efforts required to collate responses from the Dial Before You Dig (DBYD) service. As response numbers were large, Western Power were finding the cost of collating and sometimes printing plans was large, and their teams in the field were not able to be efficient at all times, with the traditional method of having printed plans on site. It was realised there was a need for automatic collation.
The fundamental issues with concerning DBYD replies, including:
• Managing DBYD responses for multiple jobs can be challenging, time consuming and expensive.
• Risk Management Issue - if enquiries are not submitted or if all responses are not received and used.
• Each enquiry can have 5-15 responses each that need to be collated.
• If you have submitted 100’s of enquiries, the number of responses can get overwhelming.
Solution - Western Power have changed processes with the use of PlanAccess. PlanAccess is an online service that manages and collates DBYD responses into individual job packs, providing significant cost and time savings by eliminating what has traditionally been a resource intensive process.
Benefits - PlanAccess automation has successfully eliminated all manual collation of the DBYD responses. Western Power on-boarded over 350 users as part of their PlanAccess corporate
deployment. This has resulted in the elimination of approx. 6 minutes per DBYD request, on approx.
18,000 enquiries per annum. This has produced a 60% productivity uplift in the DBYD process. It has also reduced emails within their corporate email system, provided improved access to responses across the business and in-turn improved staff safety and corporate liability. PlanAccess is an industry adopted solution that provides real benefits to the business.
Conclusion
By way of the above four case studies, we have discussed four problem areas in the Damage Prevention arena that affect asset owners in general. For each, we covered the solutions
implemented and the associated benefits that have been realised. In summary, we have looked at how asset owners have made progress in their Damage Prevention journeys.
Acknowledgements
Port Pirie Regional Council Penrith City Council City of Gold Coast Western Power
