The challenge and opportunity
The City of Moncton faced a universal challenge: how to align the backward-looking financial reporting they had in place with the forward-looking delivery of sustainable infrastructure.
Without a solution, the City of Moncton could not deliver service to their high standards as efficiently as they aimed to deliver it. Information was not always relevant and came via expensive, siloed software systems. This created two points of frustration: it depleted their budget without sufficient ROI, and it limited their finance and accounting teams’ participation in their asset management program.
Recognizing that finance and accounting are pivotal to the management and value of their assets, the City of Moncton decided to take action. They brought the finance and accounting team together with the Roads, Facilities and Parks departments. The group built a common asset hierarchy that supported the financial reporting requirements while creating a shared understanding of the financial needs of their assets into the future.
The solution
The City of Moncton implemented Assetic to form the backbone that connects finance and accounting to all other departments’ asset management activities. They required real-time asset inventories sourced from GIS, the ERP system and directly from Assetic to form an integrated asset management database. Assetic also performed all fixed asset financial reporting.
Using Assetic, the City of Moncton’s asset managers collaborated with the finance team to model a range of options, seeing how their assets would perform over a range of timelines and funding scenarios.
“With this approach becoming uniform across the organization, we will have much better control of our assets, manage them more cost effectively and assist in long-term planning and funding for the replacement of all categories of assets,” says Gregg Houser, Deputy Treasurer of the City of Moncton.
The results
- Organizational information silos removed via newfound alignment between finance and accounting and the City of Moncton’s service delivery departments.
- A projected 10% reduction of capital plan using Assetic along with a more strategic asset management plan.
- Dramatically improved data dissemination, presentation and support of decision-making via Assetic’s rapid outputs: asset renewal investment strategies, comparison graphs and charts showing asset performance over time, impact on taxpayers for various funding levels, and a detailed capital expenditure program — visualized and shareable via GIS.
- Actionable information about how best to invest taxpayer money on roads and facilities, resulting in requests for expansion into additional infrastructure assets.
- Support for meeting and maintaining more accurate PSAB 3150 reporting requirements by seamlessly connecting the asset register to the full enterprise.
- An estimated 20% ROI against the cost of Assetic products.