Creating a World-Class Asset Register
Matzikama Municipality is the first in the country that has successfully captured their entire electricity network asset-base into a Best-In-Class Enterprise Asset Management system, incorporating a Best-Of-Breed Asset Register. This is the most comprehensive electrical network data capturing project that has ever been undertaken in the country. Now that the entire electrical reticulation network has been captured, one can follow the hierarchical structure — up or down.
Both overhead and underground cables lengths can thus be given in sub-metre accuracies. Furthermore, a specific type of asset — low voltage bundle conductor — can be extracted and listed with the greatest of ease.
Matzikama Municipality is now able to pin-point each and every medium and low voltage pole, transformer, kiosk, streetlight position, etcetera. Since all the assets are linked by a parent-child relationship, it is possible to report on the accumulated costs at the parent level in the asset structure. The maintenance or repairs cost of a meter kiosk is thus rolled-up to the next level in the structure, and so on and so on until it reaches a point where it makes more sense to extract the accumulated costs into a report.
Old-fashioned cable-markers are no longer a requirement, since the routes of both medium and low voltage cables have been captured. The GPS coordinates of the cable-route now serves as cable-markers. Furthermore, cable-markers and intermediate poles have been captured as Linear References in the system, thus, giving the municipality a total view of the network with full flexibility for maintenance.
Gone are the days when a team has to go out to capture the network detail before load-flow and/or fault studies could be done. With the detail captured, it becomes a simple process to transfer the data from the Enterprise Asset Management system where the greatest accuracy is now guaranteed.
With this, Matzikama ensured that they have the necessary data in place to eventually implement Business Intelligence Techniques. This will place them at the forefront of municipal management.
Matzikama Municipality is in a class of its own as far as the management of electrical assets are concerned — they can do better than any of the small, medium or large municipalities and even better than almost all of the metros.
Best-of-Breed Enterprise Asset Management
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), the nation's second largest public transit agency, has selected Infor EAM Enterprise Edition to manage maintenance of its assets and more effectively utilize the resources that maintain them. The CTA, which provides transportation for the City of Chicago and 40 surrounding suburbs, will use the solution to determine optimum performance and maintenance levels on its more than 200 facilities.
This system that we are using is in use at more than 1200 cities, municipalities and government agencies worldwide. What's is also important to note is that Agulhas employs Infor's EAM Enterprise Edition to for its Collaborative Asset Management Service.
Development of the Strategy
During the development of the Infrastructure Asset Management Strategy for Matzikama Local Council, senior management have committed to be appropriately sympathetic to the aspirations and values of the community. As a result, they have adopted 15 year Vision and supporting plan titled "Towards a More Sustainable Matzikama Local Council (Action Plan — 2008 to 2023)" which is a key measure and guide for the development of the Infrastructure Strategy.
Automated Call Centre
For a mere R1, customers of the participating municipalities can now send an SMS to 32484 to report a power failure, blocked drain, pothole, et cetera. Upon receipt, a work order would be generated and emailed to the appropriate department.