Imagine an Interactive Asset Management Plan that is always up to date!
Welcome to the Iamdata Solutions Asset Management Newsletter - 1 July 2023
Are you tired of managing your assets on spreadsheets and struggling to make sense of all the data? And when it comes time to rewrite your Asset Management Plans, the job just seems to get more and more complicated and tedious. I know writing the Asset Management Plans was never one of my favourite jobs when I was an Asset Manager, and who wants to read a document of hundreds of pages long when you can tell the story of your assets through visualisations. If you are thinking the same thing, it might be time to switch to Power BI to build your interactive Asset Management Plans.
What is Power BI?
Most people who analyse data will have heard of Power BI, but for those of you who haven't, Power BI is a powerful business intelligence tool that can help you analyse and manage your asset data with ease.
I've written a lot about Power BI, if you want to find out more here's the link to other articles:
Design Your Power BI Asset Management Plans
The first step to designing an Asset Management Plan in Power BI is to determine the specific metrics and insights you want to track. This will help you choose the best visuals to display your data. Some common metrics you may want to track include maintenance costs, depreciation, asset utilisation rates, and maintenance completion rates.
Once you've determined your metrics, you'll need to create the necessary data tables and relationships in Power BI. This may involve importing data from multiple sources and performing data transformations to clean and prepare your data for analysis.
Next, you'll need to create measures, calculated columns, and DAX formulas to calculate the metrics you want to track. These formulas can be used to create visuals such as bar charts, line charts, pie charts, tables, matrices, maps, geospatial visuals, and gauges.
What visuals to use?
I usually build a summary page first that includes most of the relevant information about the Asset Class. You could build a different Power BI Report for each Asset Management Plan, or build them all into the same Power BI Report. The things to consider is how much data are you pulling from the systems. Power BI can cope with big datasets and it may be more efficient to pull all the asset data out from the asset management system and apply various filters on the visuals to show the correct details for the asset class. It is something to consider.
Bar charts and column charts are useful for showing trends in maintenance costs, budgets, actual spend, and depreciation.
Line charts are useful for showing trends over time, such as asset capital and maintenance history.
I'm not a huge fan of pie charts and donut charts. The data you can visualise using these charts is very limited, but they can sometimes be useful for showing the breakdown of asset types and the average condition of the network. Build tool tips into the visual and you can get even more insights out of it.
Tables and matrices are useful for displaying detailed information about assets, including identification, maintenance history, and financial metrics.
Maps and geospatial visuals are useful for displaying asset locations, including the ability to filter and drill down into specific regions or locations.
Gauges and KPIs are useful for displaying key performance indicators related to asset management.
Designing an Asset Management Plan in Power BI can help you gain insights and make informed decisions about managing your assets. With the right visuals and metrics, you can quickly identify areas for improvement and optimise your asset management processes.
What are the benefits of building a Power BI Asset Management Plan?
There are many benefits an organisation managing large numbers of infrastructure assets can gain from moving from a paper-based Asset Management Plan to an interactive Asset Management Plan built in Power BI, including the following points:
Real-time insights
One of the main advantages, in my opinion, of moving from a static paper-based document to an interactive Power BI report is that we can monitor asset performance in real-time, allowing Asset Managers to make data-driven decisions that will improve the performance of the assets. The great thing about Power BI is that it enables you to connect to live data sources, such as databases or cloud services. This means that as your infrastructure asset data changes or updates, your Power BI reports and dashboards can automatically reflect those changes in real time. This real-time data synchronisation ensures that you have the most up-to-date information at your disposal.
Better visibility
A well developed and designed Power BI report allows us to gain a holistic view of our asset management data in visuals and format that is easily understood, giving us better visibility into our operations.
Improved accuracy
Moving from a paper-based system to a digital system like Power BI can significantly improve data accuracy and reduce the risk of errors. If we can eliminate the need for manual data entry from the process and directly imported or automatically collected from various sources, reducing the associated errors.
Increased efficiency
Power BI enables us to automate many of our asset management processes, which leads to increased efficiency and productivity. We can do what Council's and other Local Government organisations do best - more with less!
Cost savings
With Power BI, we can track maintenance costs, depreciation, and other financial metrics more effectively, and this makes it easier for us to identify areas where cost savings can be achieved.
Customisation
Power BI offers a wide range of customisation options, allowing us to tailor our Asset Management Plans to our specific needs and requirements.
Improved collaboration
Power BI allows multiple teams to collaborate and work together on asset management, and goes a long way to reducing silos and improving communication between all the stakeholders involved in implementing asset management within the organisation.
Enhanced reporting
With Power BI, we can create customised reports that provide meaningful insights and help us make sense of the vast amounts of data we have to deal with. With a well designed Power BI report our our fingertips we are in a better position to make well informed decisions about our assets.
Scalability
Power BI can scale to meet the needs of organisations of all sizes. It works extremely well with all Microsoft products and many, many others making it an ideal solution for organisations managing large numbers of infrastructure assets.
Other considerations that forms the Asset Management Plans
Identification of Asset Rationalisation / Modification Opportunities
What about the identification of asset rationalisation / modification opportunities that have been discussed in the traditional paper-based Asset Management Plans, I hear you ask? Well, we can utilise Power BI's analytics capabilities to analyse the data and identify asset rationalisation/modification opportunities. We can build visualisations such as heat maps, charts, or graphs to display asset performance, maintenance costs, utilisation rates, or any other relevant metrics and identify assets that may be underutilised, have high maintenance costs, or are no longer aligned with your organisational goals.
We can also leverage Power BI to conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of potential asset rationalisation/modification opportunities. Calculate the costs associated with modifications or decommissioning and compare them with the expected benefits, such as cost savings, improved performance, or increased asset lifespan and we can build easy to understand visualisations and reports to present these analyses to stakeholders.
Risk Management
Including risk management within the Power BI Asset Management Plan can help identify, assess, and mitigate risks associated with your asset portfolio. We can build a number of visuals to help us present the identified risks in a clear and intuitive manner. We can create visualisations such as risk matrices, heat maps, or radar charts to depict the severity and likelihood of each risk and include filters and slicers to allow stakeholders to explore risks based on different asset categories, locations, or other relevant parameters.
Service Level Targets
Incorporating service level targets within the Power BI Asset Management Plan can help ensure that performance and quality goals are defined and monitored effectively.
We can build meaningful reports and dashboards that represent the service level targets and associated KPIs. Visualisations such as gauges, scorecards, or trend charts can provide a clear and intuitive view of performance against targets.
Another great gain we have by building our Asset Management Plans in Power BI is that we can set alerts and threshold values within Power BI to notify stakeholders when the performance deviates from the defined service level targets. This allows for proactive management and timely actions to address any issues that may impact the targets.
All in all, I believe that building your Asset Management Plans in Power BI is the way to go. Once it's built, connected to the source data, and the data is getting regularly refreshed then there's not much more you need to do. Your reports are always up to date with the latest data.
How are you currently developing your asset management plans? Are you relying on traditional paper-based methods and spreadsheets? How much time and effort does developing your Asset Management Plans consume? Can you imagine the time-saving potential of automating tasks and generating real-time reports with the help of Power BI?
Are you ready to unleash the power of Power BI and revolutionise your Asset Management Plans? I'd love to hear your thoughts, challenges, and success stories.
I have worked on many different projects with my Local Government clients, from designing and developing Power BI Reports, to building SQL Server databases for spatial data, to managing and maintaining the GIS and the Asset Management systems. If you'd like to discuss how we might work together, then please email me at ➡️ jill.singleton@iamdata.solutions
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