“The bottom line is that TARGIT BI Suite increases safety,” says Divisional Manager Richie Dempster at Northpower, an electricity lines company, and he adds: “it allows us to plan ahead in the long term with more certainty. It also opens up information to more people in the organization, 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.”

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 our WASP-system they were very time-consuming to generate. From a management point of view, TARGIT lets you 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 enables Northpower to easily find out how much money it is spending to complete specific tasks, identify long-term expenditure trends and to analyze how effectively it is spending the maintenance dollars. 

Overview of thousands of tasks
Previously, Northpower was using WASP Asset Management alone to manage network maintenance. Richie Dempster says that 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.

The company decided to integrate TARGIT BI 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.”

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 dealing with a piece of infrastructure as vital as the electricity network, it is essential to identify the most urgent tasks and make sure they are being completed first.