Building new infrastructure is often high profile but revolutionising asset management is just as important. We take a look at how Mott MacDonald and Cumbria County Council have done just that.
Following the successful completion of a seven-year investment in renewing expired lighting stock – and converting to LED technology to reduce energy and carbon use – Cumbria County Council’s lighting team sought a better way to effectively manage and maintain them.
With over 52,000 street lighting assets spread across the huge rural county, Cumbria County Council required an efficient and effective system to manage, operate and maintain them accurately. Previously it had lacked a system to view, edit and manage their lighting units effectively.
To support this, UK engineering giant Mott MacDonald developed a street lighting asset management system called Brite, a bespoke deployment of Moata Geospatial to aid in the cost-effective management and operation of lighting assets.
Brite now provides an integrated spatial and tabular view of all the street lighting assets across the county, which not only provides full geographical context to their information, but also allows the team to view asset locations and attributes with ease.
In practice, this new approach has led to huge efficiency savings in locating and updating their assets, with a significant reduction in errors due to the provision of transaction tracking and modular access rights. It has been used extensively, with over 570,000 transactions recorded since the system was deployed in February 2019.
Creating this type of data and analysis tool that is easy and efficient to use, has big implications for asset management. The ability to filter, particularly spatially using imported shapefiles, has saved hours of interrogation time, allowing the team to readily find all assets located within a boundary, such as a national park.
This has also had another advantage for the region. It has improved the speed and efficiency with which information can be shared with partner organisations, helping to support economic growth and community aspirations across Cumbria.
