Background
Six communities had petitioned Transport Canberra & City Services (TCCS) for new playgrounds or upgrades to existing playgrounds over the past two years. A key driver was 45% of playgrounds being over 15 years old and thus not providing quality play relative to the community’s expectations.
New playgrounds are costly to build to current design standards and TCCS has limited playground renewal budgets. Therefore, the asset strategy conversation had to be less about funding options, and more about sustainable service provision.
The challenge
TCCS research data showed age and condition were not the main drivers for playground utilization; instead, community perceptions of play spaces within a playground as “modern” was key. Taking this service-centric approach, TCCS set a target for 75% of play spaces to be “modern” by 2028. With this as context, asset management scenarios were developed to show the future impact of different decisions over time.
TCCS was managing the playgrounds’ asset strategy with a short-term view, working from annual budgets driven by renewing assets that were failing each year. There was minimal connectivity between asset strategy and service outcomes, and no way to optimize investment of limited funds to enable maximum benefit to the community.
The solution
TCCS partnered with Brightly and leveraged the Assetic platform — both now a part of Siemens Asset Management — to create asset management scenarios to optimize investments in play space assets based on current service provision and future asset utilization. Further, we partnered with TCCS’ Esri team to visualize the asset management options and service impacts by combining suburban demographics with future asset performance in a shared view.
“Gone are the days of gut feelings and anecdotal wish lists in order to obtain funding for essential works,” said James Downing, Systems and Information Manager at Transport Canberra & City Services. “By taking a scientific and factual-based approach using spatial data the ability to influence budget outcomes, prioritization of works and long-term planning has been enhanced greatly.”
The results
TCCS and Assetic’s collaboration has enabled a true customer service approach to asset management strategy for the play spaces across Canberra. This connection between service planning and asset planning enables optimization of asset investments over time, maximizing customer service outcomes.
Esri technology facilitates this connection by visualizing the relationship between these two processes. This enables asset managers to tell the future infrastructure story to decision makers and the community alike, making the asset management strategy consumable to all stakeholders.
“There are numerous core activities and deliverables that TCCS is responsible for, including roads, parks, stormwater, public amenities as well as delivering essential public transport for the residents of Canberra,” said Downing. “Nothing outside exists in isolation and the power of being able to mix and mash different spatial datasets with asset management strategies allows for incredible insight on the reality of situational circumstances that influence what is occurring. We rely on this capability immensely to achieve specific business objectives.”
The future
TCCS will further develop this service planning capability across other areas based on the learnings from the play space project. By combining the asset and location intelligence capabilities from Assetic and Esri with data science and visualization skills, TCCS is positioned to be a leader in both service planning and asset management visualization.