The challenge
Any local government with a golf course knows that keeping the green looking its best takes a lot of effort — and mowing! From the tees to the holes, fairways and general areas of the course, every square meter must be verdant, trim and tidy all year round. Maintaining golf bunkers — shallow sand-filled pits to test a player’s ability — is another intensive task, as is watering, blowing away debris, spraying weeds and fertilizing. The list of jobs continues, including maintaining paths, moving holes and markers, running soil and dam tests, maintaining equipment and more.
Despite having been a long-time user of Confirm for asset management (since 2001), its golf course teams relied on work schedules printed and pinned to a corkboard. If a new customer inquiry came through during the day, the team would have no visibility of the issue in the field. It also made it difficult for management to track the status and costs of maintenance activities and asset conditions, with little to no work history trail recorded.
In 2019, Monash was required to re-tender for its central asset management information system (AMIS) software to support the end-to-end management of all council assets. Once more, Brightly (which was later acquired by Siemens) was selected as the preferred partner, leading to Monash shifting to the Confirm OnDemand cloud-based solution in 2020. Monash took this opportunity to streamline more of its work processes and add new asset classes to the system — including for its golf courses.
With Confirm OnDemand, Monash wanted to improve efficiency and provide better service by eliminating manual processes and double handling, accessing real-time information and improving reporting. They also wanted to leverage ConfirmConnect, the platform’s mobile solution, so workers could access customer requests and jobs while out on the golf grounds.
The solution
Monash’s asset management team worked with Brightly (now Siemens) and the golf team to develop a GIS-mapped asset inventory for every hole on both golf courses. Next, they completed a comprehensive business process review, hosting configuration workshops to understand current practices and discussing how they could be better streamlined. The team captured the huge range of tasks in the program, setting up repeating job regimes for regular work and cyclic job regimes for seasonal work. The forepersons were also set up to be able to instantly send scheduled jobs to their teams, allowing them to complete the task and close the job on the spot.
After walking the leadership team through the system and getting the go-ahead, next came getting the word out to the golf course teams and stakeholders — and, of course, their buy-in. This was achieved by:
- A monthly communications pack for stakeholders outlining the project, objectives, training and delivery timelines, including before key project milestones
- Toolbox meetings to provide staff with project updates and upcoming training awareness for the golf team
- A Confirm learning hub, a built in SharePoint accessible to all staff in the field on their device, linking to all learning material, project communication, links to the system, step-by-step process instructions, quick tip videos, training dates and e-learn resources
- Visual reminders at the golf course of the program, training, go-live date and a QR code to the learning hub
- Training sessions to walk staff through the new processes developed for actioning inquiries and jobs in ConfirmConnect — both classroom-style and practical sessions in the field
- Awareness and training reminder walkthroughs by team leaders a week before training sessions
- On-the-ground support and assistance for two weeks after go-live
Recognizing the importance of being agile and flexible to the golf course teams’ needs, Monash decided to refine some of the configurations after the system went live based on the team’s experience. This included keeping mowing and bunker maintenance tasks as repeating jobs while allowing up to two weeks of tasks to be scheduled; moving to a task-based approach using cascading attributes for those activities not completed every day; and implementing a more streamlined prestart checklist, including safety checks, which also uses cascading attributes.
The results
The use of ConfirmConnect for asset management and work scheduling has resulted in the following:
- Increased efficiency through more streamlined processes
- Enabling staff to access, record and monitor tasks in the field
- Better data provided to leaders to make more informed decisions
- A better understanding of the cost of the maintenance of its golf courses, how long tasks take and how many staff are needed to do those tasks for smarter, data-driven decisions
- Levels of service that are consistently met
- Improved course conditions through the ability to monitoring the condition of assets over time