Northpower gets its name from the electricity lines network it owns and maintains in and around Whangarei in New Zealand, but a significant part of its business is managing a franchised area of Vector’s Auckland network from Penrose down to Papakura. Managing risk on its client’s electricity network has become a whole lot easier for Northpower since it integrated TARGIT with an existing Asset Management system…
Manages thousands of tasks
Electricity lines company Northpower has around 30 field crews of between one and six people who are constantly fixing faults and performing maintenance on the network. Each crew is assigned ‘work packs’ - bundles of up to 250 tasks to complete. With the amount of tasks assigned to work crews at any one time numbering in the thousands, managing maintenance is very complex. And when you are dealing with a piece of infrastructure as vital as the electricity network, it’s essential to identify the most urgent tasks and make sure they are being completed first.
Previously, Northpower was using WASP Asset Management alone to manage network maintenance. Northpower Divisional Manager Asset Management Richie Dempster says WASP is very good at managing data, holding information about assets and issuing work instructions to field staff, but it was difficult for staff to access the information it held in easily understandable reports. Therefore, Northpower started evaluating other options.
Information becomes accessible
After evaluating several approaches and products, the company decided to integrate TARGIT Business Intelligence Suite with its WASP system. “Effectively WASP is unchanged,” says Dempster. “TARGIT sits on top of WASP, takes the information and makes it easily accessible.”
TARGIT allows Northpower to generate summary reports on different asset groups - power poles or substations measured by, for example, field crews or geographical areas. “Although these types of reports were available with WASP they, were very time-consuming to generate. From a management point of view, you can quickly see whether everything is under control or not,” says Dempster.
TARGIT also integrates with Northpower’s financial systems, enabling the company to develop reports that combine maintenance and financial data. This allows Northpower to easily find out how much money it is spending to complete specific tasks, identify long-term expenditure trends and to analyse how effectively it is spending the maintenance dollars.
A catalyst for efficiency
The bottom line, says Dempster, is that TARGIT BI Suite increases safety, and it allows Northpower to plan ahead in the long term with more certainty. It also opens up information to more people in the organisation, which acts as a catalyst for efficiency improvements. “Before we had oodles of data but were struggling for good information. Now the brainpower goes into strategic thinking rather than extracting the data.”
